NaNoWriMo is almost upon us. Writers everywhere are stretching fingers and sharpening pencils, saying farewell to loved ones and clearing schedules to accommodate large blocks of writing time.

The goal of NaNoWriMo is to pen 50,000 words within the month of November. Your mission is to get to that word count. There are no rules on how you get there!

I was going to save these sneaky tricks for Halloween, but I thought I’d give you an early treat! Below, five tips absolutely guaranteed to inflate your word count. Follow these, and you’ll be speeding toward 50,000 in no time!

1. The two-word first name! By naming your heroine Penelope Ann instead of Penelope, you sneak in an extra word every time she’s mentioned.

2. Involve a foreign setting in your plot, so that characters can speak in their native language and then translate for the outsider — double the word count for the same amount of content. Bonus!
3. Get ornate with your place names. Two- (or more!) word places are common enough in our real world and in our fiction, so why not use them in your fiction. If your action takes place on a ship, remember that HMS counts as a word all by itself. Space stations are also naturals for multi-word names. And, not only can you have a multi-word place name, but you can add further signifiers to it, like North, South, New, Inner or Outer. As an added benefit, you might inadvertently end up creating a name whose abbreviation spells a word. Perhaps that word can become part of the flavor of the place. (It’s all chaos and disorder in Lower Arden Woods!)
4. Speak formally. Avoid contractions. Why turn two words into one if you don’t have to?
5. Titles, titles, titles. Like the two-word name, this adds an extra word or two every time your characters’ names are mentioned in dialogue or narrative. Combine a title with a two-word name for a triple play! (That’s Royal Cartographer Penelope Ann, to you!)

Are these tips really sound writing advice? I trust you to judge that for yourself. Will you have to go back and clean out most of this stuff later? Probably.

But hey, don’t worry about that now — National Novel Editing Month is months away!

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This post originally ran on this blog in October, 2010, but reprinting it is going to become a tradition. If you have any similarly tongue-in-cheek tips, please submit them. I’ll add them next year, attributed. I’d love to repost this list every year and see it grow!

Click through to visit some random things around the web that are making my inner geek smile today:

* The Dalek While-You-Were-Out Note — courtesy of BBC America. I want to print this out and hang it on my door.

* If IKEA Were Here Before the Druids — those wordless instructions always make construction seem so simple, don’t they?

* Goodnight Dune — a perfect Arrakeen homage to Goodnight Moon, and one that gives new meaning to the little mouse on every page (my favorite part of the book!).

* My Little Golden Book About ZOGG — A frighteningly well-done reinterpretation of a classic Little Golden Book, showcasing its innocence by recasting it into a tale of alien invasion. We humans are so very susceptible to cuteness. Heed this cautionary tale, lest it be our undoing…

NaNoWriMo is almost upon us. Writers everywhere are stretching fingers and sharpening pencils, saying farewell to loved ones and clearing schedules to accommodate large blocks of writing time.

The goal of NaNoWriMo is to pen 50,000 words within the month of November. Your mission is to get to that word count. There are no rules on how you get there!

I was going to save these sneaky tricks for Halloween, but I thought I’d give you an early treat! Below, five tips absolutely guaranteed to inflate your word count. Follow these, and you’ll be speeding toward 50,000 in no time!

1. The two-word first name! By naming your heroine Penelope Ann instead of Penelope, you sneak in an extra word every time she’s mentioned.

2. Involve a foreign setting in your plot, so that characters can speak in their native language and then translate for the outsider — double the word count for the same amount of content. Bonus!
3. Get ornate with your place names. Two-word town names are pretty common in our real world, so why not use them in your fiction. And, not only can you have a multi-word town name, but you can add further signifiers to it, like North, South, New, Inner or Outer. As an added benefit, you might inadvertently end up creating a name whose abbreviation spells a word. Perhaps that word can become part of the flavor of the place. (It’s all chaos and disorder in Lower Arden Woods!)
4. Speak formally. Avoid contractions. Why turn two words into one if you don’t have to?
5. Titles, titles, titles. Like the two-word name, this adds an extra word or two every time your characters’ names are mentioned in dialogue or narrative. Combine a title with a two-word name for a triple play! (That’s Royal Cartographer Penelope Ann, to you!)

Are these tips really sound writing advice? I trust you to judge that for yourself. Will you have to go back and clean out most of this stuff later? Probably.

But hey, don’t worry about that now — National Novel Editing Month is months away!

Most writers with dark sensibilities will know that a group of crows is called a murder; many will know that a group of ravens is an unkindness.

The best reference site I’ve found for collective animal groups (and a well-worn bookmark of mine) is actually this one, courtesy of the National Prairie Wildlife Research Center of the USGS. This comprehensive list is a great resource, is broken out conveniently by category, and is not limited to just animals of the prairie.

IfWhen, as a writer of things dark or otherworldly, you should find yourself needing to write about groups of the sorts of creatures that… don’t quite make it onto that list, there’s another resource to consider:

Courtesy of Amy Sturgis, behold The Stoakes-Whibley Natural Index of Supernatural Collective Nouns from Wondermark by David Malki.

(click for the full-sized image)

It’s even available for purchase as a poster, for convenient referencing!

Each day, these blog posts collect dozens of comments that aren’t fit to print. Spammers are so inspired by my posts that they write in to tell me all about their lives and their creative endeavors, and even their personal bedroom secrets and the medications that enrich their private lives!

I have one spam-bot that sends me really, really bad riddles every day. Like, really bad. Like, your eight-year-old would roll her eyes and say “I heard that one already!” …But they do make a refreshing change from the usual.

They also ask me many, many questions, so I thought today would be a fitting day to finally acknowledge them publicly, thank them for their trust and confidence, and give them some answers.

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Thanks for your suggestion! This blog is now enriched with 26 vitamins and minerals, to be a part of your balanced breakfast. My cat is licking the screen as I type, and she approves.

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This one’s more a comment than a question. It would also have been a lot more compelling if it hadn’t been written in response to my Ad Astra schedule.

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“more”

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No, but your semi-colons can be safely run through the dishwasher on “low” once a month.

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Thank you, spam filter settings!

If you have any real questions about writing, editing or publishing, please leave a comment or use my contact form. Thanks!

Writing advice will often tell you that you have to know the formula in order to break it. Nothing makes that rule clearer than comedy does.

As I mentioned last Thursday on National Grammar Day, without an appreciation for the rules of Grammar, we wouldn’t have the basic framework to understand why LOLcats and Oddly Specific signs are funny.

Sometimes the humor isn’t in twisting “the formula”, it’s in exposing it… as in these examples, presented for your viewing and listening pleasure. Enjoy!

* Tribune’s banned words, all in one sentence.

* The definitive Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer. (youtube link. requires sound.)

* The definitive boy band song: Title of the Song by Da Vinci’s Notebook. (requires sound. Yes… as songs often do! *cough*) If you like their music, please consider purchasing it.

(Part of Da Vinci’s Notebook tours these days as Paul and Storm. Insert gratuitous plug here. They’re worth catching, if you get a chance!)

* And The Onion reports: Nation Shudders at Large Block of Text. WASHINGTON—Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text. (click link for the rest of the story!)

There’s nothing I can say today. Instead, I turn to our friends at I Can Has Cheezburger:

…Yes.

(But it’s still not a crapshoot!)

Click through the image of Tuesday’s comic (above) and continue forward — it seems to be the start of a story arc!

William Shakespeare was baptized April 26, 1564 and died April 23, 1616. Whether you’re celebrating his birth or commemorating his death, this is the Bard’s week.

There are a lot of Shakespeare-inspired gifts out there. Far more than I could spotlight or even list in a single post. They could fill a whole blog by themselves. But, in honor of the Bard, I thought I’d share a few of the wittiest offerings I’ve found:

The Romeo & Julienne cutting board brings a literary touch to your kitchen. It’s available from perpetualkid, from Amazon, and from numerous other shops online.

Two clever applications of Shakespearean quotations are available from the Globe Theatre’s gift shop: an “Out, damned spot!” eraser and a “Hoods make not monks” hoodie.

But you don’t need to travel all the way to the source to find your witty clothing. A search for “Shakespeare” on Cafepress will keep you busily browsing for quite a while.

In the current clever vein, though, the t-shirt proclaiming “And thus I clothe my naked villany” is most deserving of a special mention!

Have a favorite Shakespearean-themed gift? Drop me a line or leave a note in the comments!

It’s just a couple short weeks until the start of Passover (the holiday comes early this year: sundown on Wednesday, April 8th). As you’re beginning your holiday preparation, keep a copy of the guide to kosher imaginary animals nearby.

It’s hard enough to stick to a restricted diet while on a normal vacation, much less when stranded in a mystical ocean or enchanted forest, but Ann VanderMeer, practicing Jew and editor of Weird Tales has contributed her knowledge so that we all might benefit. Small enough to print and store on the shelf with your cookbooks, this guide will soon be a kitchen reference staple!

Just as all scholarly Jewish writings do, this one invites interpretation and further question. Be sure to browse the comments too, to learn when it’s appropriate to wrap bacon around a hobbit.