Which, honestly, could serve quite decently as a random name generator for your Fantasy / SF #NaNoWriMo novel.
Located at http://burgundy.io/ .
This random word generator is absolutely honery
Burgundy.io generates new words, but no banal syllable-musher is this. It uses a recurrent neural network to find uncannily English-sounding terms. The results are quite periper, with a burledish s…
Writing the highly competent super-spy / agent / cop / killer / whatver is a lot easier at #NaNoWriMo time when someone gives you some business you can have them do to show how bad-ass they are at being aware of threats before they surface.
Sort of like this article. Whether it's "real" or not, it's got good enough verisimilitude to steal from for your novel.
How to Develop the Situational Awareness | The Art of Manliness
Jason Bourne was a master of situational awareness, and you can be too. Here’s how to develop it so you can be prepared no matter the situation.
This is actually a pretty good list of bad worldbuilding techniques for your cool SF/Fantasy novel. To sum up, it's "Not considering how things fit together" and "Filing off the serial numbers of 'real world' stuff without actually considering how it works."
It's probably too late for your #NaNoWriMo novel at this point (stopping to do detailed worldbuilding doesn't produce word count, and having characters infodump about the world is rarely engaging writing[1,2]) … but, at the same time, giving some of these items some thinking during non-writing time — whilst commuting or showering or doing the dishes — might suddenly give you an insight into a bunch of additional complications you can throw into your novel to make your characters' lives more difficult.
[1] Unless your name is J.R.R. Tolkien — but he didn't wing it. He spent decades in worldbuilding, essentially writing novels as an excuse to use it.
[2] On the other hand, infodumps that get frequently interrupted by other people with either differing viewpoints of the nature of the world, or outsiders with this-just-occurred-to-me questions about it, can actually be sort of interesting — and produce more conflict.
7 Deadly Sins of Worldbuilding
Worldbuilding is an essential part of any work of fiction. But especially for science fiction or fantasy, it’s the lifeblood of storytelling. But when worldbuilding fails, it can wreck your whole story, and leave your characters feeling pointless. Here are seven deadly sins of worldbuilding. The Rules of Quick and Dirty Worldbuilding The Rules of Quick and Dirty Worldbuilding The Rules of Quick and Dirty Worldbuilding Worldbuilding is the art of …
I noted yesterday the music I’ve been listening to whilst writing up my Donne & Donne 50s noir detective fantasy.
I’ve also been steeping myself in some appropriate other media. I’ve been reading a slew of Rex Stout Nero Wolfe novels from 1940s and early 50s. I’ve also been reading some of the early Robert Parker Spenser novels, which were very heavily Raymond Chandler-influenced. And, of course, I reread Dashell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon (1930) before this all kicked off.
While kinda-sorta staying caught up with our usual DVR list, I’ve also been watching a lot of the early 00s Nero Wolfe series from A&E.’
I don’t know if it’s helped my novel-writing, but it’s been fun.
A site that generates first/last name combos from the 1990 US Census. You get fully random combos and “probable” combos.
The links then do Google searches so you can see if anyone has the name (that you should worry about).
(via kottke)
