The Qwertyrash Blogs

Well guess what? I clicked on a banner ad. I rarely see one that catches my eye, but this one sure did. It is Visual Thesaurus.

Doesn’t sound catchy yet. But what it does is present looked and related words in a mind-map style. So next time you need to brainstorm, it does it for you! Sure you’ve always been able to do the same with a thesaurus, but because this draws the map for you, it is sooo much faster. And visually, yes, you do spot words of interest much faster too.

It does have a brief trial and thereafter you’ve got to pay either US$19.95 per year to subscribe to the online version, or buy the desktop version for US$39.95. I think the online version provides better value.

Have a look though, if you work with words or ideas, I’m sure you’ll be impressed.

thesauruswritingideasbrainstormingmindmap

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One of my assignments involved making a list of ten useful websites for writers. I decided it would be good to post it online here as well.

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Deb McDonnell aka Scribbling Damselfly, provides a wonderful insight, with the assistance of Natalie Goldberg, into writing and overcoming writer’s blockI’ve seen this advice before, in the form of Give yourself permission to write a shit first draft — but that last line, about writing without a destination, suddenly unpacked a whole new level of this advice for me. Writing a cruddy first draft is all very well, because it’s not about deliberately sitting down to write crud: it’s about writing through self-doubts and lack of trust and perspective.But lately it hasn’t been working so fully for me, and Goldberg’s snippet above unpacked why.

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They’re for amateurs!I got writer’s knot.This is when your stomach clenches, your bowels ache, your head hurts and your brain freezes.

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Learned some things of course and discovered others.The most interesting thing I discovered was I already knew some things.

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Having got back into writing in the last week, I noticed when I finished a chapter there was a sense of completion and uncertainty about what chapter to do next (each chapter is mostly independent of the previous so I can do that)But even if I was writing straight through from beginning to end, I’d encounter the same problem.So what I do now, is always leave my desk with an unfinished chapter.

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In Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the computer is asked for the meaning of life. It eventually answers “42″.

Douglas Adams claims this was a figure simply plucked out of the air. Despite this, many have hypothesized on why he chose 42.

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Writers check out this site with a zillion different word search tools:
Rhyming - Crossword - Scrabble - Quotations & Cliches - Anagram - Computing - Law - Synonyms - Antonyms - Related - Spelled Similarly - Similar Sounding - Substring - In Definition Of - Connections - Intersection
Visit site: Dictionary, Rhyming, Crossword Puzzle Solver, Scrabble, […]

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You’re not all like me. If you’re lucky, none of you are. So this little piece of advice will be irrelevant.
Become a writer first, before you learn to write.
People like me, our personality type is obsessed with rules, logic and what is right. Problem is, that can be a huge stumbling block. We could study […]

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What do you do when you have a great idea but you don’t have a pen and paper handy?
Unless I’m in the shower, I’ve almost always got my mobile phone handy, so write and save an sms (my old phone I had to send it).
What do you do?

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