The Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror (oww).

Having limited time to write, much less to seek out and regularly attend a face-to-face writers' group, I find access to the oww invaluable. The flexibility can't be beat. You earn points by reviewing stories posted by fellow workshop members; you "spend" points when you post your own work for critique. So, you can post and review at your own pace. With hundreds of members, at all levels of writerly development, there are always opportunities to connect with other writers of similar interests for regular critiquing, as well as plenty of scope to exchange critiques with complete strangers. Yes, there is a joining fee, but you can test drive it for a free month, and see what you think before plunking down your hard-earned cash.

Dramatica

Would you rather drop dead than make an outline? Does advance planning take all the fun out of writing for you? Then you probably won't care for any of the software available at the "StoryMind" web site.

Me, I use "Writer's Dreamkit"--and I love it. Character development and world building tend to come fairly easily to me (at least I like to think so), as does thinking up stressful situations to inflict upon my characters. A well-paced, conflict-driven plot, on the other hand, is much trickier to achieve. The dramatica software lets me take my characters, situations, and ideas, and helps me find and exploit the conflicts so essential to storytelling. I've found it a huge timesaver, as I can develop a story before getting all caught up in the artistry of actually telling it. No, I don't slavishly follow my outline. It's just a guide that regularly gets superseded by changes I make along the way. At least I know what I wanted to have happen in the story, and when I make changes, I can gauge their impact on subsequent events.

Think you might like to try it? Check out the free demo.

Inspiration

Simply the greatest thing since sliced bread. Inspiration is mind-mapping tool I originally experimented with in hopes it might prove helpful to my children in learning how to write well-organized reports for school. Well, they do use it for that purpose, but that was after I fell in love. There's a free demo available at the inspiration website

Inspiration lets you jot down your ideas in a "brainstorming", organize them as a diagrammatic "mind-map", and add notations and links to websites or documents on your hard drive as you go. Then, at the push of a button, it transforms the diagram into an outline, which you can manipulate further as you wish. The whole thing can then be exported to your word processor...and off you go.

I use it for organizing, focusing, and keeping track of my research notes for stories. I also use it for organizing the large scientific reviews I write for work, as well as other personal projects. There's even a website template I used to rough out the organization of this website.

Artist's Way

The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, by Julia Cameron is "a course in discovering and rediscovering your creative self." The spirituality is of the loosest variety, or at least she leaves the reader free to interpret it however they prefer, but I can see she has a point: tapping into your creative well can only occur if you leave yourself open. It's not always easy, and the twelve weeks of mental exercises she recommends can help. I went through the book last summer, when I was increasingly finding myself not writing (even when I had the time, which is rare enough) because my guilt wheels were too busy spinning over all the other things I wasn't doing while I sat at my keyboard writing at the pace of about two sentences per week. The "morning pages" habit has been a huge help with that. I don't always get to it, and I don't always write three pages. But most mornings I take about twenty minutes with my coffee, my leather-bound notebook, and my favorite fat pen, and lay out my plans for the day. Yes, it starts out like a glorified to-do list, but that alone helps me feel like I'm on top of my day (in a way my palm pilot--brilliant tool that it is--never has). And you know what? When I am in the throes of trying to work out a thorny writing problem in a current story WIP...that twenty minutes, while I write those pages, is where I always seem to solve it. Poetry, on the other hand, tends to arrive during walks on the beach. But that's another story.

Sinister Visions

"Sinister Visions" is a wonderful graphic arts site with a lean toward the dark side. I picked up the "Zombified" font (used to create the titles for this web site) from their free stuff collection. Thanks Chad Savage!