A to Z: Resources

I thought that I would take a brief break from the psychology topics to have a more writing related post. This is a listing of some handy resources I've picked up along the way.

Forward Motion for Writers - This is a community site for writers aiming for publication. I've been a member for a few years now and I adore the community of the site. There are a variety of areas to participate in, from weekend challenges, yearly word count/edit marathons, writing related dares, daily/yearly writing goals, and more.

Holly Lisle's Shop - She has some very useful e-books for writers, at reasonable prices. I've bought different titles from here over the years, some of which I've read on my PC, others I had put on my Palm. My favorites are the clinic series (Create a Character Clinic), the 33 mistakes series, and Lazette Gifford's 2 year novel series (I have book 1).

Unrestricted Stock Photography/art - This is a listing of stock art accounts on DeviantArt that allow unrestricted use of their stock (see the rules on the page). They can be handy for sprucing up a blog, making a scene from a novel, visualizing your characters. They are commonly used for photo manipulation, and other visual art references.

Database Stuff: I've been working on an Access database over the years for my writing, and I have an empty version of the file that I might share out at some point if anyone is interested. I does require having the MS Access program. I started the database before I had Access 2007, so some of the forms and report formatting is a bit off. I'd want to clean it out before sharing.

I'm also open to discussing database design, so maybe some of the ideas I've had might help others in organizing their writing stuff. My current database is for top level data on a variety of areas. For example I can enter in all my characters names, personality type, goal (in 255 characters or less), who they are related to, ect. But for more extensive notes I still use Word.

With databases the actual data is stored in tables. Access is a relational database, so data in one table can be used along with data in other tables. These are the tables in my database:
Agents, Characters, Goals (my writing goals), Markets, Progress, Series, Submissions (what work was sent to which agent when), and Works.