A Color Scheme Generator
A quick link for today, but one I’ve found useful when it comes to web-design and picking the right color schemes: Wellstyled’s Color Scheme Generator.
Through the use of a wheel of colors, you can pick a color dominant, and see how other colors fare against it. Different options are available; whether you wish to prioritize the view of simple contrasts or to see how multiple color schemes are rendered against the chosen background, it’ll be easy to get a first idea of what a webpage will look like. A whole set of options also allows you to check how the displayed scheme will appear to color blind people (protanopy, full color blindness…). There’s much more you can do with it, but these are already a good preview of what this color picker lets you do.
I keep a stack of such little tools nearby. I always find them useful to see in a few clicks if the idea I have in mind can work or if it’ll be a visual aggression all by itself, this without demanding me to modify my stylesheets and upload them first.
I wonder if I’m right in thinking so, or if I am sort of deluding myself with this belief. I know that more than one writer has said that the first million words (or so) an author writes is crap, and I’m ready to swallow this and go on (although I’m probably past the million already given the amount of writing I do, but let’s consider it as a million words of serious novelling, not blog posts, aborted attempts at stories in junior high, and the likes). Now—and this is more specifically related to the “quantity vs quality” argument—can we consider that every word of every sentence of every first draft will always necessarily be crap, regardless of the years of practice a writer has behind her?
Although this doesn’t work the same for all of us who write, finding names for my characters from the start is for me always an important task. I need the names to resonate with the personality they’re associated with, and I need to be able to name my protagonists, rather than refer to them as “character X and Y”. At times, I’ll need days to find THE name, and it’ll usually be triggered by something totally unrelated. At other moments, the name comes by itself, or I already have it in mind, and develop a personality around it. Both methods work in my case, which is something I’m glad about, yet I must admit that the first one can be annoying—what if the days turn to weeks or even months? Remaining stuck because I lack a name to go on with a story can be very frustrating.
It’s a weird and unpleasant feeling, especially when it’s a scene that is planned, and not an idea that has struck all of a sudden and “looks like a good one”. It makes writing become sluggish and a chore, yet I know I can’t just give up or switch to something else in a snap of fingers, else I may very well remain stuck for much, much longer.I have such a scene in my current work in progress. It’s an important enough one, where one of the main characters reveals what she knows to the two others. It’s a planned scene, that actually looked great in my outline, when I noted town its main points and what was going to be revealed. However, it feels like a bore to write now, mostly, I suspect, because I’m not sure by which end to take it.