Fun Friday Resources

Let’s do some writing!

First up, Lose the Very, a practical thesaurus-like website that will help you expunge the word very from your manuscript while improving your vocabulary. It’s very helpful invaluable.

If your writing involves scholarly research, or even if you just need to verify some weird fact for your fantasy sci-fi romcom set on Jupiter, you have probably run into the Problem of the Paywall. One solution is unpaywall.org, which has freed tens of thousands of scientific articles.

For a more general, wide-ranging solution, try 12ft Ladder, which uses Google’s webcrawler to snag articles behind a paywall. (I wonder how long before Google starts blocking all that…)

Lastly, if you haven’t found writing software that works for you, check out Best Book Writing Software, an article by Dave Chesson, the “Kindlepreneur.” I used Scrivener to write my books (and other projects), and recommend it to anyone trying to write a book, but Atticus looks intriguing as well.