Writing is hard, really hard. Coming up with words to put to the page is possibly one of the greatest (and most rewarding) challenges of my life. Some days the words just aren't there, other days I can't stop the flow let alone get them out fast enough. Once it's done though, WOW, words can truly be things of beauty, art on the printed page or computer screen.
Nothing comes close to the sheer elegance and grace of an artfully constructed paragraph painting a picture in your mind of an event, person, feeling or thing. At it's best you're an artist, directing and manipulating imagination and thought through the printed word.
So for my writers out there, I have made a list of some of the excellent free tools on the internet. This will be an ongoing list, updated as I find new treasures. For now, though GET TO WRITING!
Tools of the Trade
A Lorem-Ipsum Generator - http://generator.lorem-ipsum.info/#loremIpsum
So why in the heck would you need this? I'll explain, often I need to do mock-ups for clients so they can visualize the "look and feel" of a document BEFORE it's written. To do that though you need mock text to fill out the page, well this tool provides just that! You've seen this type of mock text in documents before, technology now though has made generating it rather simple.
Foter.com - http://foter.com/
As a blogger one of your biggest hurdles is going to be finding images and pictures to accent your writing (like the one at the top of this page). Sure you can Google images and grab someone else's work, but if you're going to do this properly then what you want are Creative Commons images. If you have the budget there are stock photo companies that take the hard work out of finding the right image, but if you're like me and doing this on a shoestring then that is out of the question.
Freenetlaw.com - http://www.freenetlaw.com/
As a tech/non-fiction writer I find I need boilerplate legal disclaimers on many of my documents, especially documents that have the potential to be distributed outside of their intended audience, and documents that clearly need to be labeled as proprietary and confidential. This website helps with many different types of boilerplate legalese that you can use and edit to your specific need.
1001 Free Fonts - http://www.1001freefonts.com/
Just what the name implies, an amazing resource for thousands of free fonts, many unique and unusual. If you design flyers, posters or other graphics you will LOVE this site as it has a ton of funky fonts to suit any purpose.
