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The On Writing webpage holds a selection of some of the best writing tips I've ever seen. If you are an author, you might want to go through and review; if you're thinking about authoring (authorating? authoritivizing?), these are some of the best tips ever and will make your writing better.
I was lucky enough to run into Celestial Grammar way back in 199x, and it did more for my literacy-of-writing than most of my English lit classes ever did.
Ellen, 22nd level Necromancer of Threads
Random occupation
Ever wanted to have a character have a job, but got stuck on "Uh, what do other people actually do?"
Random Modern Job Title Generator. It's a bit iffy when you select a field - it seems to ignore the field selection entirely, actually - but is a lot more wide-ranging than I seem to manage on my own. Whack it several times and pick the most appealing (or least).
Ellen, 22nd level Necromancer of Threads
Random Person
I use something a wonderful person developed; it runs under Linux, which means it's not going to work for most of you until you evolve into enlightened beings. Which you totally should, but I know, you're busy.
Next best is the Fake Name Generator at fakenamegenerator.com which creates WAY more than a single fake name.
A review of the site output is here at the Schneier on Security blog.
An example below:
But you might want something a little less, erm, numeric. And with description. Try this general person generator at Seventh Sanctum.
One output:
Now, if she just had a personality... Say, a Meyers-Briggs personality type, or an Enneagram personality type.
So combine them, and voila! Instant person in far more detail than I can come up with in ten seconds. If you have Firefox as a browser, an interesting way to arrange these is in a Bookmarks Toolbar folder, and put all the randomizer links in it; later you can just right-click the folder and pick Open All In Tabs for an instant set of pages ready for highlight-and-paste into your saved-character file.
Almost better than summoning zombies!
Ellen, 22nd level Necromancer of Threads
I'm an evolved enlightened
I'm an evolved enlightened being :P What's this I hear of a Linux only name generator?
Have delightfully devious day,
A dear friend
(by which I mean she hasn't yet tried to kill me)(yet) wrote me a program that takes info from a list of names pulled from US Census data, then throws it in with some other statistical info, and comes up with... well, lemme show ya.
The one argument we've had is whether it should include unusual names (my opinion) or not (theirs). Since I'm not really a programmer, you can guess (and see) who won.
Data has to be stuck several places, which I don't remember...
Edit/Update: /usr/local/share/extras/* for the data files, and /usr/local/bin/extras for the binary.
[...] but I do have the tarball, and it's GNU GPL'd, so.
Ellen, 22nd level Necromancer of Threads
Released!
Extras-0.7.6
I just stuck it in /usr/src, unpacked it, and typed 'make' and 'make install' and there it was. Yay!
To invoke, make sure it's in your path (/usr/local/bin) and just type 'extras -h' for the switches. No manpage, alas; but I'm not going to bitch until I can do one myself.
For the rest of you, this is a Linux/C program, so Windows is right out unless you use Cygwin (in which case you're already smirking at me because you know how to run Unix stuff in Windows) and I think Macs may require independent thinking to get it to go.
And no, I did not write this. So don't even bother asking me about it. RTFM! in the sourcecode tarball.
Ellen, 22nd level Necromancer of Threads
a little more information ...
... which no one is likely to see, since it's fallen off the front page by quite a bit, but hey, not my fault. :-)
extras installs (make ; make install) the primary executable, extras (extras -h for switches/usage), and is symlinked to 'goon' and 'bimbo' which respectively set the -m (male) and -f (female) switches (and if you don't like the names of executables, you can change them in instloc.h).
There are a number of additional utilities. "pains" can be given information about adult height, bmi, and sex (such as can be derived from extras), and will generate height, weight, and bmi for ages 2-20. This can be interesting for character development, particularly if you have some adults who grew up together, and want to allow random chance to tell you something about their relative sizes at particular ages (different birth years makes this slightly more complex to visualize without tools to line things up, but so it goes and so it goes). Give "riches" the information displayed by extras for menstrual cycle, plus an initial onset, and it will give you the subject's menstrual calendar for the number of cycles that you specify (this is only of interest if you're going to let cycles have some impact on the timing in the story). "bmi", given two of the trio 'height', 'weight', 'bmi', generates the third. Don't take body mass index as an absolute in your own life, but as a storyteller's aid for visualization, it's not terrible. "alea" is a dice-roller; the extras installation symlinks that to "mins" that defaults to 1D60 (use for minutes past the hour, or for durations under one hour; this is most likely to be useful if you like to timestamp things and find yourself reusing certain times consistently despite an effort to "think of a random number from zero to fifty-nine").
Okay, that's all pretty boring. Oh, and while Ellen likes to think I wrote it for her ... *laugh* I wrote it for me, but shared it with her, and was willing to accept her feedback 'cause she's a lot more prolific and dedicated than me.
Oh. Names are from the US Census, and nearly ten years out of date, by now, but that won't be terribly important. Frequencies are *not* correct for any other culture, including without limitation: the UK, Canada, Oz, and all them countries that name kids with some furrin werds.  Жизнь прожить—не поле перейти. You *can* substitute a different database, if you put it into the format that extras understands (which may be documented in the source, and if not I'd have to stare at it for a while before I could figure it out again). It's got a known bug that leaves out certain names that are in the database. [UNUSUAL] appears because that information is not available in the data: incidence of names at that point is so low that the supplied data just says "all others: X percent". It's not a matter of putting in different names; they just aren't there. I could adjust it so it leaves that bit out (as a command line switch), but that's not going to happen soon.
:-)
Amy!
I"ll
I'll have to give it a whirl... I do occasionally use name generators and I'm always glad to find a new one.
Thanks to the both of you!
Have delightfully devious day,
Hi Ellen!
Just wanted to say I was checking your site out the other day and was impressed with the wealth of information available there, thanks hon! (Hugs) Taarpa
A few good tips, but I'd question anyone who chooses...
...out of the thousands of writing guides, a mediocre handful which includes anything by Orson Scott Card, whose hateful views on homosexuality are well known:
Recently, when his strident homophobic stance began to cut into his book sales, he's ‘moderated’ his position with weasel words, but he's still the same lovable bigot on his home turf.
Oddly enough, at least for a science fiction writer, he doesn't believe in science, and thinks that ‘scientific domga’ informs discussions on subjects as diverse as global climate change, creationism, and the acceptability of many types of personal conduct.
Not only that, he's a crappy writer.
For writing guides, try these:
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Ewkay but
where did I mention Orson Scott Card? Or, where did I link to him or his stuff or?
Ellen, 22nd level Necromancer of Threads
OSC
You didn't, but the page you referenced did. No biggie.
not as think as i smart i am
One tip that's important to me
I got a tip from Robert Graves' The Reader Over Your Shoulder. It's pretty much the essence of the book.
The idea is, that when you're reading you have to watch for places where your eye gets stuck. I mean, if you hesitate, even for the slightest moment, it means there's a problem in the writing. If you stop and have to figure out what's meant, it means there's a problem.
You have to write so that the reader's eye can flow through your prose without having to pause, back up, recalculate, or work anything out.