Love thy characters. . .

. . . or at least care what happens to them. If you don't care, why the heck should your reader care? Just be careful not to care so much about them that you make sure that nothing bad ever happens to them. I once started reading a story online and nothing bad ever happened to the main character - you can bet how fast I put that thing down.
Make your characters work, make them suffer for their goals, don't be afraid to kill them if the story requires it.

Oh, and don't forget to laugh today.

Link of the day

So, the link of the day is -
The Anti-guide
The Anti-Guide is a forum topic on the site Gaia Online. It's very long, at the moment there are almost 1600 pages, I'm currently on page 144. Yeah. That's a lot of pages. What it is, is a place to post "advice" for writers. It is an Anti-guide, anything that is said should be taken in reverse. Excellent forum, and you do not need to sign up to access it. Enjoy!

Character naming - part 1

Names help bring the characters to life and they bring certain prejudices. One must be careful with them! If you have two characters from the same small place and one is called Bliradella tifanreta and the other is Jack, then you have a problem and should proceed with care. You might be able to pull it off, but it's a lot of work.
Keep track of characters that have names that begin with the same letter. In one of my novels, I have Jaden, Jonah, Jinx, and Jaytur. Things tend to get confusing rather quickly. Your reader will have trouble keeping these characters separate. I am (slowly) working on rename Jaden and Jaytur. This, for me, anyway, is a subconscious thing. I don't go out and say "Oh, I want four male characters in this novel with names beginning with J." No.
And a bit of advice: Did the parent of your character(s) have a crystal ball so they could see what would happen in their future? No? Then please do NOT give them names that match their paths in life. The poor parent probably had very little idea what their children would do and so would not have given them special names.
And that's an end to part one of our segment on character naming!

Quote

"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
-Thomas Mann

A what will never be a completed list of links.

I will get to posting what the people asked me to write about - later.
Through the years that I have been writing, I have found link after link that has inspired me. The list I have compiled off the top of my head is short, but will grow quickly.

1. Seventh Sanctum
2. Chaotic Shiny
3. Serendipity
4. Squid.org

This is just the beginning. I'm sure that, once I scour through all the e-mails I've sent people I'll find more writing related links.
Have a link? What do you think the comment box is for? **hint, hint**

Poll results.

The results are in!
Three people voted for "Too many to count!"
And one person voted for "1" and for "Too many to count."
Alright, so there are people besides me with far too many writing projects going - nice to know I'm not alone.

Next poll will be. . . . coming soon!
Thank you for voting!