Since English isn't my native tongue, I needed some way of checking the spelling. Since my NaNoWriMo story, Winter Bloom, I have found Wordsmyth to be an excellent resource. I've used it constantly in my writing. The spellchecker on the word processor works great but there are some words you just have to check. It's a lot faster than a normal dictionary. I'm sure there are lots of other similar websites but I've found this to be very friendly and suited to my needs. It's great, really.
English is lot more complex than I had expected. In my strive for perfection, I stumble constantly on new things I wasn't very aware of before. How do they make those beautiful sentence structures? How can I achieve that kind of mastery? Another thing missing in my writing is a big vocabulary. My vocabulary just seems too limited. I think my writing sounds like that of a foreigner, which is exactly what I don't want. Next month I'm determined to do a lot of research using my favorite books on sentence structure, vocabulary, and grammar. Authors I'll be using are Robin Hobb, J.K. Rowling and Terry Pratchett. Also, The Da Vinci Code sounds like an interesting thing to research. It's quite popular. Maybe I can find a few things that make a good book and use those in my stories.
