WRITER'S TOOLBOX

Alta Vista's Babel Fish--A site offering translation to and from English for a number of different languages. It's not very colloquial, but it can be helpful.

Bartleby.com--This site has it all! Dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia, quotations, Strunk and White's Elements of Style, the Bible, just about anything you could want for making your writing sparkle.

Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com--Two great sites, each easily accessed from the other. Terrific to work with. Dictionary.com also has a Translator function.

10,000 Year Calendar--This is a 10,000 year calendar that we can change to whatever year we'd like, including 2068, our first year in the fic. Use it as much as you like! Direct links to 2068 and 2069.

City Distance Calculator--This is a distance calculator with a more global presence. Pull down menus help you find the exact city you're looking for. The ads are annoying, so just scroll down to the bottom of the page.

Fanfic Med--A Yahoo! group where you can pose medical questions relevant to your writing and have them answered by medical professionals! Membership required.

How Stuff Works--Need to know how a cell phone works? A satellite? A maglev train? If you want the details on how something works, this is the place to go!

OneLook.com--A dictionary that is a jumping off point to several other dictionaries, including some foriegn language ones. Try the "wild-card" and "commonly-used words only" features.

ScienceMadeSimple.net-- For conversion to metric and more, this little website can help you discover exactly how fast Gordon's hydrofoil was going when it crashed, and how many meters tall Thunderbird Three really is. Easy to use and covers just about anything you'd need.

SpellCheck.net--A free online service that can check a single word or your whole message! A must for any writer!

TimeZoneConverter.com--This is a great time zone conversion site so you'll know that if it's 8 a.m. in England, it's 8 p.m. on the Island. Use this one a lot!

PS: use the NZ time as the time for Tracy Island; it's a whole lot easier than GMT. A note about this site: the year notation on the Timezone Converter only goes up to 2037. You'll need to use the year 2013 if you want to align the days of the week up with those of 2069. Otherwise, you'll get an entirely different day of the week than the one we're on.

WorldTimeZone.com--Want to know what time zone Brazil is in? Greenland? Japan? Alaska? This map will tell you. The home page is a map of the world, but the pull down menu will give you views of smaller parts of the world. A great resource when we're figuring out when a rescue is supposed to take place and where.

The Very Best of British--A guide for translating US English into British English and back. Very funny, and educational, too!

page updated 12/05/10