Resources blog. Angel, 14, China. I code, I write, and I sleep a lot. That's about it. Here, you'll find resources of all kinds, from writing to coding to photoshop! I hope you'll find something that will be useful for you.
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Massively Open Online Courses are the new vogue way to take control of your education and your career, and it’s the bestthing. Higher education should be a right, but many of us can’t afford or can’t even access modern college courses. Anyone with conviction and a few extra hours a week can get themselves a college education from some of the best teachers in the world. You can even put finished courses on your resume. Just a few colleges that offer free online courses: MIT, Boston University, Dartmouth, Cornell, University of Tokyo, Harvard, Yale University, and the University of Geneva - and that’s barely scratching the surface.
Those are some of the most funded, most prestigiously staffed universities in the world. The education offered by them, for free, is at your fingers. Just because the world might hold degrees and the brick and mortar institutions of modern universities as a reward for the already privileged or the lucky doesn’t mean you don’t have the resources to learn. Throwing the exposition away, here are my favorite courses for writers available this fall semester:
English Grammar and Styletaught by University of Queensland’s Roslyn Petelin, Gabrielle O’Ryan, and Michael Lefcourt. It’s a basic writing course, taught by professors who understand English like the backs of their hands.
The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours: Epic and Lyrictaught by Harvard’s Professor Gregory Nagy. Course on heroic story structure that walks you through the ancient Greek heroes and stories that set up the future of western literature. Breaks down the Epic and Lyric forms.
Unbinding Prometheustaught by Eric Alan Weinstein through Open Learning. The class, starting in November, will explore the meaning of Percy Shelley’s work and the impact the man (who believed writing could free mankind from their shackles) has had on the world he left behind.
The Divine Comedy: Dante’s Journey to Freedom taught by many Georgetown professors, including Dante and Derrida: Face to Face author Frank Ambrosio. It looks frankly awesome, talking about the modern reader and Alighieri’s work, and the first sentence of the class description speaks for itself: Students will question for themselves the meaning of human freedom, responsibility and identity by reading and responding to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.
Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrativetaught by Vanderbilt University’s Jay Clayton. This class is about Lord of the Rings Online. It’s not actively running, but you can access all the materials online.
Laura Ingalls Wilder: Exploring Her Work & Writing Lifetaught by Missouri State’s Pamela Smith Hill, an Ingalls Wilder scholar. Wilder’s Little House series has informed our perceptions of her era in North American history, but there’s more than meets the eye in her stories. Just like Shakespeare, there are more than a few controversies around authorship, and a lot to talk about in this course.
How Writers Write Fiction taught by University of Iowa’s professor (and author of Things of the Hidden God) Christopher Merrill. The course presents a curated collection of short, intimate talks created by fifty authors of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays that you can’t catch anywhere else. Features weekly writing assignments.
Poetry: What It Is, and How to Understand It taught by George Washington University’s Margaret Soltan. A class in modern poetry, the whys and hows, and a cultural learning class we’d recommend for anyone trying to broaden their artistic perspective.
EXTRA CREDIT: Important and interesting classes I would recommended.
Understanding Violence taught by Professors Deb Houry and Pamela Scully. Covers elements of biology, sociology, and psychology. You’ll study the biological and psychological causes of violence, and how violence is reported and portrayed in the media. Seems like an excellent research course for action writers.
Social Entrepeneurship taught by Professors Kai Hockerts, Kristjan Jespersen, Ester Barinaga, Anirudh Agrawal, Sudhanshu Rai, and Robert Austin. Doesn’t just talk about how to use social media for your own benefit — the course is meant to break down how to use social media and community engagement for global change.
Comic Books and Graphic Novelstaught by University of Colorado Boulder’s William Kuskin. Explores the medium at length. Has special class topics on Batman, Neil Gaiman, Pop Culture, Defining Art, and Gender.
There are many things to keep in mind when naming the town or city in your novel:
1) Genre/Theme/Tone
It’s very important to consider the genre and theme of your story when choosing a town name. Take these names for example, each of which indicates the genre or theme of the story:
King’s Landing (sounds fantastical) Cloud City (sounds futuristic) Silent Hill (sounds scary) Sweet Valley (sounds happy and upbeat) Bikini Bottom (sounds funny) Radiator Springs (sounds car-related) Halloween Town (sounds Halloween-related) Storybrooke (sounds fairytale-related)
2) Time/Place
It’s also important to consider the time and place where your story takes place. For example, you wouldn’t use “Vista Gulch” as a name for a town in Victorian England. You probably wouldn’t use it for a town in modern day North Carolina, either. Vista is a Spanish word and would normally be found in places where Spanish names are common, like Spain, Central and South America, the southwest United States (including southern California), Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and Florida.
3) Size/Settlement Type
An isolated town of 300 people probably won’t be Valley City, but a sprawling metropolis of 30 million could be called Windyville, because it could have started out as a small town and grew into a large city.
4) Geography
Words like gulch, butte,and bayou tend to be regional terms. You probably wouldn’t find Berle’s Bayou in Idaho, or Windy Butte in Rhode Island.
Words like mount, cape, and valley are dependent upon terrain. Most of the time, you won’t have a town named “mount” something unless there are hills or mountains nearby. You wouldn’t use “cape” unless the town was on a cape, which requires a large body of water.
5) History
Is there a historical person or event that your town might be named after? The Simpsons’ hometown of Springfield is ironically named after its founder, Jebediah Springfield. Chattanooga, Tennessee is named after the Cherokee town that was there first. Nargothrond, in The Lord of the Rings, is an Elvish town with an Elvish name.
6) Combination of Words
person name + geographical term = Smithfield, Smith Creek
group name + geographical term = Pioneer Valley, Settlers’ Ridge
descriptive word + geographical term = Mystic Falls, Smoky Hill
person name + settlement type = Smithton, Claraville
landmark + settlement type = Bridgton, Beaconville
Word Lists:
Types of Settlements
Geographical Features
Place Words
Common Suffixes
Other Descriptors
Try a combination of two words from any of these lists. :)
accidentally swapped phones with someone at a party and don’t realize until their mom calls in the morning and you spend like three hours talking to this hilarious woman about life and when you go to her house to return her kid’s phone wow the kid is the really good kisser from the party last night au
