Fun Friday Resources

Some days, you may want to browse Medieval images instead of working.  Those people were weird.

There are many places on the intertubes that will help you copyedit your work, though nothing takes the place of a real life editor. (And may I say that I am still astonished to find a typo or a missing word in every single high-falutin', for-real-published-by-for-real-publishers book that I read.)

Here's one that is new to me: DraftMap.  It's free, and the fun part is the color coding they do for the usual categories: repetitive words, passive voice, adverbs, clichés, readability, and style.  It does not check spelling; one assumes that your word processor already does that.

If you're a fairly solid writer, as I pretend to be, you probably won't be surprised to see the words you repeated or the length of your sentences because you did it on purpose the first time, but perhaps this is a way to double-check yourself before allowing others to tear it apart for repeated words and long sentences. (See what I did there?)

Also, at the bottom, you can click to show reading level, number of paragraphs/sentences/words.  The reading level thing would be very useful if you were — just to pick a random example — writing a kids' version of your book.

I've always loved the work of artist Robert Rauschenberg — his methods of collage/assemblage are fascinatingly complex and opaque, and just the boldness of his gigantic gesture paintings overwhelm me.  I was unaware of his Divine Comedy drawings until recently, and I'm not done studying them yet. Give them a whirl.

(Bonus resources: If you're interested in the image transfer process, here are three resources on ways to do that: 1 (probably closest to Rauschenberg's process) | 2 | 3 )

Finally, some day you may wish to have a topographic map of Idaho or Rhode Island. You will need to know kind of where on the planet you want to examine, longitude/latitude, but Google maps can tell you that.  Download the TIFF file for best results.  Note: the maps are not up to date.  The map of my neighborhood still has Newnan Jr High School on the map, and that building has not existed since I was there in 1968.