Friday Fun is a group post from the writers of the NHWN blog. Each week, we’ll pose and answer a different, get-to-know-us question. We hope you’ll join in by providing your answer in the comments.

QUESTION: Is there any genre of books that you just can’t stand reading? How about a particular author? Time period? 

Wendy Thomas – When one is a writer, one needs to tread very gently when being critical of another writer’s book. We have first hand knowledge of the blood, sweat, and tears that went into it’s birth. I truly hesitate to damn anyone’s work. Having said that, let me say that the books that get under my skin the most are the ones that are:

• Predictable – saw that ending coming from a mile away
• Poorly written – repetition, poor dialog, and poor editing
• Written as a script – seems to be a trend in…

Fanfiction gets a bad reputation from many, including George R.R. Martin and my own dad. They dismiss it as “lazy. ” As in “go write your own stories you punk kid!”

Let me tell you, there is nothing lazy about writing three 100k+ word novels. And that is exactly what I did when I was in Heroes fandom in high school, along with ~25 short stories, and 5 novellas. I clocked in probably 600,000 words in the span of three years. And you can bet I became a better writer for it.

No, I did not learn how to create believable original characters, but I did learn how to write realistic speech. I learned how to take some deep, meta looks at the psyches of fictional people, and how to write arcs of growth, and how to create chemistry between characters.

True, I didn’t learn how to world build….but I…

1) Chaotic Shiny:

This site, in reality, is the probably one of the only sites you need. It has like 50+ generators, and has many uses. Great for science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction writing.

2) Behind The Name:

It has a random name generator, name meanings for both first names and last names, and names that mean specific things.This could be used for any type of fiction writing when you need to come up with cool-sounding names, and especially when you want your characters’ names to have specific meaning.

3) Seventh Sanctum:

Like Chaotic Shiny, this site has lots and lots of different generators, including the What-if-inator, and the Alien Race Generator, which includes up to a paragraph of description for each generated result. This is a good website for fiction in general, but especially for fantasy, science fiction (and writing…