Links!

Okay, I’ve been collecting links to articles and sites that I’ve found interesting for awhile now, and it’s time to purge my backlist. So here they are, in no particular order:

Beth Anderson’s Tips on Writing the Tight Synopsis – The marvelous Jenna Stuart recommended this article, and it has some great advice. Definitely worth the read!

Seeing Red: How Color Alters Our Behavior – An article on, you guessed it, colors, and why all the fast food chains seem to use the same decorating schemes of orange, yellow, and red.

The Hidden Force of Fragrance – A Psychology Today article on the power of scent, though it makes a statement that’s chilling for someone whose own sense of smell has markedly decreased: “A decline in the ability to smell may be an early signal of neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and Huntington’s diseases.”

Food: The Science of Scrumptious – Another Pyschology Today article, this time about the taste, why we like what we do, and why some people are such darned picky eaters.

10 Creative Ways to Earn Extra Money – Okay, the selling of the books just ain’t gonna happen, but some of the other options might be viable.

The Creative Self – Suggestions on how to maintain an active creative life.

Why Your Baby’s Name Will Sound Like Everyone Else’s – An article on naming phenomena and why that unique name you picked out might not end up being that unique after all.

The Eroticization of Equality and Social Justice– A Huffington Post article written by Hillary Rettig in defense of the romance genre and why it’s denigrated in the first place. (If you’re going to read any of these, make it this one!)

How to Spot Mr. Right – A look at why (or why not) opposites attract. (Yes, I know the irony of adding this link right after the previous, but deal with it.)

Neanderthink: The Appeal of the Bad Boy – The title pretty much sums it up.

The Laws of Chemistry – How biology and evolution dictate attraction.

The Beginner’s Guide to Twitter – I’m not able to really get into Twittering due to technological constraints, but here’s a how-to guide for anyone who might be interested.

Humans: The Strangest Species– An explanation for why we do the strange and varied things we do; everything from why we have fingernails to why we’re optimistic.

Accounting for Taste – How the music, books, and movies that we like can reveal who we are.

How Automobiles Work – An article passed on to me by the Great Kate W. An informative read that may not be the most exciting thing you’ll ever set your eyes on, but likely one of the more helpful.

Fluevog.com – I’ll confess; this isn’t actually an article, but this site has some really cute women’s shoes. (Some really strange ones, yes, but some cute ones, too.)

Whew! I didn’t realize how much I’d saved. Hope you something at least marginally interesting. *Grins*

The Neat Stuff Out in the Internet Ether

In an effort to fulfill all Librarian-esque duties for my local RWA chapter, I asked members for their favorite research and/or writing tips, tricks, and techniques websites with the intention of gathering all the links and placing them in a couple easy-to-access locations for the group as a whole. I’m going to wait a few more days before sorting and displaying as only a handful of people have been able to respond so far, but holy toledo–what they’ve sent me is pretty damn cool. I didn’t know this stuff was out there in the internet, ripe for the taking, which is stupid of me, I know, but still. Way cool.

The chapter gets first priority, but once I get the list set up over there, I may have to still a link or two for my site. *Grins* Granted no one minds.

So? Anyone out in this neck of the woods have any really neat research sites to recommend?

Speaking of research, I stumbled on a History Channel show called “Life After People” which was, in a “this is totally a sign” semi-creepy way, just what I needed when I needed it. The show describes what would happen to all the man-made structures if humanity were suddenly wiped from the planet. Not exactly your Tuesday night pick-me-up, but fascinating nonetheless. The two characters talking loudest at the moment (who aren’t the ones I need to be focusing on, by the way, though I decided to let it go because writing something was better than writing nothing), while decidedly human which makes the basic principle of the show a bit moot, are a part of a world where the human population had been abruptly and drastically been reduced, so a lot of it still applied.

If Only I Didn’t Have to Sleep

I’m a night owl living in a morning-person’s world. *Sigh* If only I didn’t have to sleep, I’d have so much time to do all that fun, [marginally] creative ideas that I’ve got floating around my head. Curses, o’ Day Job! Thy necessity is as iron bands upon my soul!! Though I must feign obedience to thy viscous demands, I shall refuse to bow beneath thy accursed stringency!

Ahem. Please excuse my emo moment. As you may have guessed, free times seems an elusive thing as of late. It’s my own damn fault, though. I’d signed up to be a judge for the RWA’s Golden Heart awards, and, naturally, set the ‘scripts aside until now, when my ratings are due in on Monday. (For those of you who may not know , the Golden Heart is a contest for unpublished manuscripts, and entries consist of a synopsis and the first 50 pages of a completed ms.) I don’t think it’d be fair to rush reading the entries since it’d my own fault that I waited so long, so I’m setting aside my editing in favor of reading each in turn. CN will just have to wait.

What’s even better [being sarcastic here, folks] is that characters from two of my other WIPs have taken to pacing inside my head. And there’s not a lot of room up there. They keep bumping into each other, and they’re getting irritable about it, but I need to first finish reading the GH entries and then complete my edits to CN before I work on either of them. And Pynimy (pronounced Pin-eh-mee), my girl, you’re really going to have to wait because you have the worst habit of only popping up when I’m not actively working on your story.

Anywho, here’s a fantastic comic I stumbled across the other day that offers a funny critique of movies and their genres. Click on the picture of the right for Brian Carroll’s description of the Romance genre. It’s pretty funny.  (This link is for my favorite strip so far, all about chick flicks versus romantic comedy.) Another link about why a man hates beauty and the results of the “contrast effect” of modern media, and finally–just to throw in the bizarre–another about a fish with a see-through head. No, really. It’s crazy.

Oo, Shiny!

Found this when perusing the web the other day. A nifty little keyboard that moves as you type? Intriguing. I keep having this visual of the keyboard acting like a ship on the ocean. Hope fingers don’t get seasick. 😀 I’m assuming that, aside from muscle fatigue and blood flow, the keyboard is designed to help prevent carpal tunnel syndrome. Don’t quote me on that, though. I’m no expert.

Once I did have a self-diagnosed case of ulnar nerve compression, which is a fancy way of saying that my pinkie and the distal half of my ring finger kept tingling or going numb. And all that is just a fancy way of saying I had a habit of leaning on my elbow wrong and pinching a nerve. Fascinating, no? 😉

If I had $150 to spend on a whim, I’d totally try out this keyboard. Don’t know how much good it’d do with a laptop, though. While I do plug in a full-size keyboard most of the time, I write with it on my lap. Still I think it’s nifty because little things like that amuse me so.

Baby Names Insinuation

Names are important business to a writer. Each of us has our own method of settling on a name. Stephenie Meyer, for example, bestowed her heroine for the Twilight series with the name she’d give her own daughter if she had one. S.L. Viehl tends to choose names based on their sound. (That is, if I remember correctly. I asked her this once, and she responded, but I can’t find the link to the site, so we’re just having to go with my rickety memory.) Personally, I like to mix muscality with meaning, which means I hit up various baby name websites to find the meanings of names I like or vice-versa.

The easiest of these sites to catch is, of course, BabyNames.com, which actually caters to us writers with a nifty “Naming Tips for Writers” link. I applaud the site for its efforts, but I still became a little peevish about Tip #3, which states that “Exotic names are for romance novels, soap operas and strippers”.

The site states:

“Romance novels and soap operas and strippers all have one thing in common—they evoke a fantasy of romance and/or sex. Characters in these genres tend to have names that are more exotic, like Chesapeake Divine or Rod Remington. If you are not writing a romance or soap opera, however, this kind of name can sound silly and out of place.”

Is this truly a problem with romance? Are there thousands of “Rod Remingington”s and “Chesapeake”s out there that I don’t know about? Keep in mind, now, that a few of my stories deal with characters’ unusual names. I even poke fun at them and the odd phenomenon, but did they really have to lump romance novels with soap operas and strippers? I have absolutely nothing against either of the latter, but the romance genre is so broad that I feel it’s wrong to lump it with pretty much anything. And I doubt that the person writing this meant that, while the name sounds silly outside of a romance novel, it’s perfectly in place within one. After all, we romance writers don’t particularly care about realism. Maybe we should be more like those staid science fiction writers with all their Bob’s, Jane’s, and Karen’s.

Oh, wait. That’s Tip #4.

In any event, I’d consider the tips to be fairly good advice, my grumblings aside. Besides, doesn’t truth inspire fiction? If you don’t believe me, just ask Makena’lei Gordon.