Epic Music to Write To

Music can be an author's best friend. I love to listen to a good movie soundtrack or epic music while I'm writing really intense or emotional scenes. Especially the emotional scenes (I've made myself cry listening to the end music from Gladiator on a loop while writing a sad part). For years all I had were my favorite movie soundtracks, but I've recently discovered other composers of epic score. My favorite is Two Steps from Hell. They compose trailer music that is absolutely incredible. YouTube is full of their music and you can get some of their tracks from Amazon and iTunes. Here is a YouTube playlist I've started of some of my favorites. The first one, Heart of Courage is (in my opinion) the greatest composition of epic music ever created. ;) Every time I hear it, I feel the need to write something epic.

 

Finding Faith Review

A wonderful review of Finding Faith by Angie who has now read and reviewed my entire Pirates & Faith series. Thanks, Angie!

 

http://www.myfourmonkeys.com/2011/02/finding-faith-fourth-and-final-book-in.html

 

Previous Reviews:

The Pirate Daughter's Promise

Every Tear and A Captain's Heart

Free Photoshop Brushes: Cracked Paint

This week's free Photoshop brushes are of cracked paint taken from photos of an old fire hydrant in our yard. Good for Photoshop 7 and up. Commercial and non commercial use.

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Royalty Free Stock Music

One of the coolest things I like to do when a book is almost ready for publication is make a book trailer for it. The best part about the trailers is the music. Music really has a way of setting the mood for a story (imagine movies without it!). But affordable stock music that is any good is really hard to come by (especially if you're looking for something epic). I've spent so many frustrating hours searching and usually come out disappointed. However, in all that searching, I have found a couple gems. Here are a few links to the best royalty free stock music websites I've been able to dig up that won't make a struggling author broke.

 

First, my favorite. This guy has a very large collection of some really great music. And the best part is, the tracks are completely free to use, but make sure to credit him. http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/collections.html

 

Not a huge number of tracks, but another very good site. Again, the tracks are completely free to use if you credit. http://www.audionautix.com/

 

Here is some classical piano music that is entirely free to use for whatever purpose. Some very beautiful pieces if that's what you're looking for. http://www.taylorhayward.org/

 

As far as paying for royalty free music, this seems like the best site I've come across as far as price. Some are pretty expensive, but I've found many to be within a decent price range. http://audiojungle.net/

Free Photoshop Brushes: Swirls

I have always loved Photoshop brushes and have finally started creating my own. They are so much fun to make and I'm sure I'll have more than I'll ever find a use for so I wanted to start sharing them here. I'll try to post a new brush pack at least once a week. They are free to use both commercially and non commercially. If you use them and have a website or blog, I would appreciate a link back to my blog (http://www.mollyevangeline.blogspot.com) to spread the word. All brushes should work in Photoshop 7 and higher. Enjoy!

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Valentine's Day eBook Sale!

For Valentine's Day all my Pirates & Faith ebooks are available for only $2.99!

 

You can purchase them for Kindle:

The Pirate Daughter's Promise

Every Tear

A Captain's Heart

Finding Faith

 

Or in other ebook formats from Smashwords:

The Pirate Daughter's Promise

Every Tear

A Captain's Heart

Finding Faith

Best Websites for Fantasy Writing

I've been writing fantasy since I was thirteen and I first saw The Lord of the Rings movies. Since then I've started several fantasy stories and have many more in my head waiting to be written. I think I'd have to say that fantasy writing is my favorite because the possibilities of what can be written are so vast. I wanted to share a few websites I found helpful for fantasy writing.

 

Here is a huge list of questions for world building. Answer all these and your fantasy world will be truly epic. http://www.sfwa.org/2009/08/fantasy-worldbuilding-questions/

 

There is so much information you can find on the Internet, but sometimes it seems you can't find the exact answer to your question. That is why this is one of my favorite articles I found. It couldn't have answered my question more perfectly: How far can a horse and rider travel in one day? That's a very important question considering horses are one of the main modes of transportation in fantasy fiction. Realistic Horse Travel

 

Here is an awesome site if you want to create your own fantasy language. It's a very comprehensive website for doing just that. http://zompist.com/kit.html

 

This is a website I found quite interesting (though extremely annoying with pop-ups). I has lists of names from pretty much any country you could think of. I've found some great names there to use in my fantasy writing, especially for fantasy cultures that are based on real cultures. http://www.20000-names.com/

Courage is Complete

*throws confetti into the air* Today is a very exciting day. After a year and 5 months, I have finally finished writing Courage. It is such a feeling of accomplishment. At 44 chapters it is the longest book I've ever written. I'm not sure what the final word count will be, but it has to be over 100,000. It was an incredible book to write. Nothing I've written has ever challenged me like this book. I think it's probably the most emotional book I've ever written. It's also special because it marks my 10th completed manuscript since I started writing 14 years ago. The journey of writing Courage has definitely been a roller coaster. Because of the intense emotional aspects of the book, I certainly drew on a lot of personal experiences. It's the first book that ever truly brought me to tears while writing. I can't wait to share it.

 

Now that Courage is all written, I have a lot of editing and revision ahead of me. It's a very, very rough draft, but I always enjoy the editing stage. I am also going to begin Trust, book 3, as soon as I can. Starting a new book is always an incredible thing so it will be part of my reward for finishing Courage.

 

And, speaking of Makilien, within the next couple of months, I will be launching a website specifically for the trilogy. I've already begun work on it. I'll have all the information about it on there, including some free stuff, and the trilogy's teaser trailer that I've started putting together. I'm really excited about it and will announce as soon as the website is live.

Fantasy Character Names - Name Generators

One of my favorite (and sometimes least favorite) things about being a fantasy writer is naming my characters. Occasionally I'll take a real name and just spell it differently, but the majority of my names are completely made up. It's great because you have the potential to create some really awesome names that suit your character better than any real name could. Plus it makes your characters very unique. Once in a while one of the really great names will just come to me, but more often than not, I use the aid of a fantasy name generator, at least to get me started. I always make sure to save any names that look or sound cool even if they don't fit the character I'm trying to name. I've actually started a quickly growing fantasy name book for myself that comes in quite handy. There are tons of fantasy name generators available and after trying many of them, here are the ones that I have found to be the most useful.

 

This is usually the one I go to first. Many of my recent fantasy names have come from using this generator. The nice thing is you can pick the length of the name you're looking for as well as some other options. http://www.rinkworks.com/namegen/

 

This is another good generator with some options such as name length and choice of first and last letters. http://dicelog.com/yafnagen

 

Lots of different generators on this site. I have found the Fantasy Place Name Generator to be particularly helpful. The name generators are also very good. http://nine.frenchboys.net/

 

And lastly, here is a downloadable fantasy name generator to use on your desktop. http://jhanson.com/software/namegen.html