Words words words

Thesaurus.com and Dictionary.com are the best language reference works I've found online, free, comprehensive, and completely accurate. Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus is enchanting to play with and look at, but its vocabulary is severely limited. The Online Rhyming Dictionary is a godsend to anyone who believes poetry should rhyme.

Naming characters

• Behind the Name - the Etymology and History of First Names lets you search a huge, international, transhistorical database of names by name, gender or meaning - including names from ancient societies or mythology.
• It has a companion site for surnames: Behind the Name - the Etymology and History of Surnames.
• If you're writing about the U.S., Popular Baby Names - U.S. helps you date your characters by popular names for each year - as far back as 1879.
• For fantasy, the Random Word Generator is a giggle.

Pictures and music

Pandora's free online radio lets you stream music similar to a specific song or artist. offers a massive selection of fantasy wallpaper, from the surreal to the fairytale to the harshly futuristic. MattePainting - beautiful worlds is another source of fantasy landscapes, with less sci-fi than 3d art. Warren Photographic's image library is rich as stained glass with themed collections - one of my favourites is the plants. Vue d'Esprit's eerie dreamworlds have slid into much of The Artist and the Mathematician and are full of possibilities. furiae is one of the few sites with characters: the digital artist Enayla's portraits of fantasy beings - elves, bird-women and knights - roam through her haunting landscapes and provocative backgrounds.

Writers' magazines

• Interlude magazine doesn't pay much (if at all) but is worth sending to anyway: beautifully graphically designed, it offers a "safe space" for emerging work to poets, writers and artists alike. The result is edgy, chancy, fun, exciting stuff.
• The Literary Review runs a themed monthly competition for poems that rhyme, scan, and make sense. (So I'm not alone)
• The London Magazine prints exactly the kind of poetry I most despise, so if you disagree with my poetry manifesto, try them!
• Mslexia has quarterly themed competitions for prose and poetry - women only, as it's dedicated to evening up the balance between men and women in publication. If you doubt such an imbalance still exists, read their article on mslexia. It also lists other competitions and has columns of excellent advice on writing and getting published.

Helpful books

If there's a difference for writers between The Writer's Handbook and The Writer's and Artist's Yearbook, I don't know it - but every writer should have one of them. Both contain fully indexed publisher, magazine, and agency listings. This is where you get your publishers' data for The Publishing Machine database.

The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron is a twelve-week 'creativity' course, great fun and very rewarding to work through. This website only exists because of this book - it encouraged me to use all my forms of creativity, not just flagellate myself to write more and more and more.

Your best year yet by Jinny Ditzler, on the other hand, is the reason I write full-time. It doesn't impose values or promise magic wands. It gives you 10 questions to think about your aims and methods, where you want to go, and how you might get there. It gives the structure; all the content comes from you. In my first "best year yet", I went from sending out 1 piece of writing every three years to quitting my job to write full-time.

Sorting out the red tape

Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) Once you're in print, you can claim from the CLA. They get copyright money and are responsible for distributing it to writers and artists - on application.

HM Revenue & Customs gives the latest bandings and allowances to calculate your tax. Put them into the Publishing Machine database and let it calculate the rest for you.