Living, Breathing Characters

I'm sure Angela and Becky won't mind a little promo for their exceptional blog.  Now that I've found it, I don't know how I lived without it.  Okay, I don't know how I wrote without it, but you get the drift.

So what's the big deal about The Bookshelf Muse?  These wonderful ladies have created the most fantastic thesauruses (thesaurusi?) for a writer's toolbox.  Need a way to describe what a character is doing/how a character is looking while feeling a certain way?  Just a couple of suggestions for "annoyed" would be a clenched jaw or tapping fingers on the table top.  Yes, fellow writers, this is where that Show Don't Tell comes in, and we can all use a little help with it now and then.  But emotions aren't everything, so there's more!

• Emotion Thesaurus
• Character Trait Thesaurus
• Settings Thesaurus
• Weather & Earthly Phenomena Thesaurus
• Color, Textures & Shapes Thesaurus
• Symbolism Thesaurus

And if those aren't enough to keep you busy giving more punch to your writing, their blog posts are just as great!  So get thee to The Bookshelf Muse where, as they say, you'll find "Writing Tools & Musings on Reading, Writing and Other Randomness."  Become one of their more than 2500 stalkers.  You'll be glad you did!

 Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.  ~E.L. Doctorow