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ROUNDUP (Part 1): General Writing Resources on the Web

© Roxianne Moore

General writing resources, geared toward writers in all media and genres, abound on the Web. Weeding through what's available to find the few gems can be tedious. This roundup will help you get started.

The Online Writer has a number of good links to general sites. One link, which needs updating on the links page, is Inkspot: Resources for Writers. Here you can subscribe to Inklings, a biweekly electronic newsletter for writers.

WRITERS WRITE (TM) is a searchable database of online publications with submission guidelines, daily news, job board, chat, message boards, research links, writer's groups, contest info, submission tracking and writer's homepages.

Anne Hart's Fiction Writing Handbook for the Digital Media is a huge and unattractive page with great links and resources. Although the page uses text in far too many sizes and colors to be easily read, it's worth the extra work. For instance, she offers the Writer's Career Preference Classifier, a huge questionnaire. This classifier can help you find the right kind of writing jobs for your personality type. I wouldn't recommend trying to add up the answers online, but you might try saving the page as text, then printing up the relevant section or using your word processor for marking your answers. Either way, she offers a comprehensive list of job titles for each personality category. She also has a Kit for Digital Media Fiction Writing, which consists of a series of projects aimed at teaching writers about the whole realm of digital media. Again, this is a huge file with lots of tiny type, and is best read offline.

BookWire is a great place to start looking for book-related information on the Web. Here, you'll find highlights from Publisher's Weekly, authors' tour schedules, the Boston Book Review, plus sites for poetry, mystery and other areas of interest. For a fee, you can also subscribe to The BookWire Insider , which delivers publishing news via e-mail every day. As I don't subscribe (yet), I can't tell you how much space this will take up in your mailbox. Next time, I'll continue my roundup of general reference sources. If you have any good ones you'd like to suggest, let me know.

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