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Read me! Two new anthologies out!

Oct20

Dark fantasy in a rust belt noir setting. Cheerful monster hunters dealing with family problems. These two stories could not be more different – except that I wrote them both.

Another body goes missing. A cop seeks an ancient story.

It’s one thing telling your family you’re a couple. It’s another one telling them you hunt monsters.

And the supernatural creeps in to even the most mundane situations…

Read Lifeblood of the City, now in Bloodlines, and We Wish You a Merry Christmas, now in Do You Feel What I Feel. I hope you enjoy them!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/994827.html. You can comment here or there.

When you see this, post three lines from three wips you have

Oct19

From scribble-myname

Lines picked from where I left off

“Creepy.” Cynara stared at the barn, at the lift slowly lowering the Jeep, at the warehouse they were coming down into. “This is not exactly inspiring any confidence in this Adder’s Who—”

“Addergoole.” Luke Hunting-Hawk was not the most talkative of travel companions, and he clearly didn’t want to be out here hauling her in.

“I wonder if you can test them for aether use? I wonder what you’d call it, then, if you wanted to be accurate? Natural aetherics? Hunh, you’d think they’d already call it that, then.”

“You gonna eat or you gonna sit there and whine all morning? I’m sure the schmuck in the next cell over will eat your breakfast with pleasure.”

Cell. They’d said cell.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/994520.html. You can comment here or there.

Nano (or other writing!) prep: Track your Words

Oct8

I was going to write up a post of links to word trackers, but this site has lots of the widgets.

Do you track your wordcount? When you’re doing nano, do you use their site exclusively, or do you keep your words somewhere else? A widget tracker? A spreadsheet? What about when you’re not doing nano?

I like tracking things. I like tracking things a lot.

My current monthly wordcount chart looks like:

Trackers1.png
some other charts and tables of mine visible here.

It was modified in part from Svenja Gosen’s awesome sheets, which I seriously recommend you check out.

While that’s where I started, there are a few other sites that look good for spreadsheet templates:

This one actually looks nice, though the page itself is a bit iffy.
Nidonocu’s site is a few years out of date, but their (2009) tracker includes a calculation for words per minute, which is interesting.
The Sprint Shack (follow them on twitter if you like wordsprints!) has a very stripped down words/day whole year tracking spreadsheet
Here’s another whole-year tracker.
Justin McLachlan’s makes good use of conditional formatting, showing you % complete and +/- goal numbers.
This form is so stripped down as to barely be worth the bother, but the tips are kind of interesting.
And this Nano Report Card has some nice journalling stuff, rather similar in concept to Svenja Gosen’s but with a less pretty interface and more journalling. (“Primary Writing Location?” “Morale?”)
This one comes with a big thermometer-like bar showing progress!

There are probably more; I only went through two pages of google results. <.<

Tracking is, I think, very individual. What do you want out of your tracking (if you want it?)

Do you know of other tracking resources – or even other SORTS of tracking resources? Let me know!


Bonus link: this page has some generators and some other interesting stuff as well as spreadsheet links.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/991072.html. You can comment here or there.

Nano (or other writing!) prep: Good name sites

Oct6

So, you’re writing something! Good, good, that’s always a good first step no wait.

So, you’re planning on writing something! (or pantsing, in which case come back to this post in November, or whenever you write it 😉

You probably have characters, and they probably need names.

(I got through two very long chapters of a theoretical serial without naming the characters, once. I’m pretty sure the Finder is just named Finder by now).

Names with Meaning
Behind The Name is the most accurate, comprehensive name site I’ve found.
Think Baby Names is also pretty good.
20,000 Names has nice lists: “Dark” Names. “Weather” Names. And so on.
Want to name a character appropriately for a historical American era?
the Social Security Database goes back to 1879 with the top names for each year.
Via [personal profile] anke: “In case anyone wants to name someone from Germany, www.beliebte-vornamen.de has lists of the most popular baby names from 1890 to the present. just pick the birth year and see“
And here’s a huge resource on historically accurate names: The SCA’s name articles
A Name-suggester site (“I like this name.” “Try these names.”) via [personal profile] meridian_rose

If you can still get your hands on a phone book, that’s a great way to pick out surnames.

Or check out Wikipedia’s lists of most common surnames by location.

Names with no Meaning
Fourteen Minutes has a lovely random-name-sound generator
Springhole has several name generators
Seventh Sanctum is like the granddaddy of name generators
Chaotic Shiny has quite a few name generators, too.
This one’s new to me (Mithril & Mages) but makes some fun names.
Serendipity Generators via [personal profile] meridian_rose

A list of Naming resources via [personal profile] meridian_rose

Baby Name Wizard, via [personal profile] inventrix and Cal’s long and useful discussion on Behind the Name and Baby name Wizard.

There! Now that all your male characters are no longer named Jack (or maybe that’s just my problem), you’re ready to go.

Well, I mean, your characters are ready to go…

…well, at least they have names.

Know any more great sites? Let me know!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/990164.html. You can comment here or there.

October Theme Poll Open!

Oct1

Come now, readers, and tell to me
The tales you think you’d like to read

Come now, friends, declare the fate
Of Patreon’s words on these cold dates

(pardon the bad extemporaneous poetry! and vote below 🙂
If you don’t have a DW account, feel free to vote in the comments).

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/988307.html. You can comment here or there.

If a Tree Grows in the Forest… a drabble

Sep29

Written to [profile] kiarrith‘s prompt here

The thing was, the industrial areas of the city hadn’t been abandoned that long. 15 years since the last manufacturing business folded in the area, sure, seven since the last start-up trying to use the old spaces fizzled out. But there were hobos and drifters, skaters and hippies. There was always someone wandering through the space. Leticia walked through herself, Tuesdays and Thursdays when she didn’t have much time between work and classes.

Which is how she knew something was up when she encountered the oak grove. It was Tuesday, which meant she’d last been through this cut-through – between the old Gleason Works building and the even older Lomb plant, where the workers of both had once shared bag lunches and a brief bit of unfiltered sunlight – it had last been only 5 days ago.

Last week, the courtyard had been full of weeds, a little bit of trash, with a beaten path straight through the middle.

Today, there were five oak trees in a circle where a picnic table had once stood. They weren’t small trees, either; the smallest one was too big for Letitia to encircle with her arms.

She walked around the trees cautiously. This had to be some sort of trick, some sort of urban graffiti gone supremely weird. Trees just didn’t grow overnight. Not in a vacant lot, not anywhere.

Her foot hit something hard. Letita knelt down to look, perplexed beyond caution.

A piece of metal twisted out of the weeds, so rusted it fell apart in her hands. Another piece of metal caught her eye, white and pitted. In the flat metal, a heart was etched, dirt rubbed deep into the lines.

Letita felt chill. She knew this heart. If she pulled the rest of the metal out of the weeds, it would say QW + ZX. She’d puzzled over those initials and the heart’s wobbly arrow for months. They’d been carved into the picnic table, the table that had stood where the oak trees now grew.

Slowly, her heart in her throat, Letita turned around to look at the city skyline.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/987764.html. You can comment here or there.

Now taking a few small prompts

Sep26

Just for fun, because I don’t feel like working on anything big.

theme: Fantasy worlds/fictional worlds/strange lands.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/985939.html. You can comment here or there.

WeSeWriMo Week 4 progress

Aug28

I got caught up!

First line of Wednesday:
Enrie looked at her notes. She’d written it down…

Last line of today:
“I like the world you live in. Can I join you there sometime?”

2443 words and 5 chapterlets/interludes, bringing the total to 8328 words & 16 chapterlets!

My WeSeWriMo 2015 Progress So Far in Chapters:
16 / 18 completed!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/977564.html. You can comment here or there.