Star Wars Writing Resources
Note: None of the resources below are mine. I just assembled them in one place for your and my convenience. Feel free to use and reblog. If you know of any other useful site missing from the list, let me know and I'll gladly add it.
NOTE (05/17/23): There's a new, much more comprehensive version HERE.
Places
Interactive Galaxy Map by Henry Bernberg
Map of the Galaxy
List of planets and moons [Wikipedia /needs expanding]
Planet Name Generator 1 [SciFi Ideas]
Planetary System Generator [Donjon]
Character Development
Star Wars Name Generator 1 [Donjon]
Star Wars OC flow chart by @thefoodwiththedood
Star Wars Name Generator 2 [FantasyNames]
Star Wars Name Generator 3 [FantasyNames]
The character creator
Droid Name Generator
Star Wars Randomizer by @aureutr
Clone Trooper face/helmet template pack by @fox-trot
Clone Picrew by @batdad
Character Picrew [Twi-leks, Zabraks, Torgutas and Nautolans] @/megaramikaeli
Star Wars Character Templates by SmacksArt [the ULTIMATE battery of template for any human/humanoid original character in any era. From troopers to droids, from Jedi to Sith, from KOTOR to the sequel Trilogy. 100% RECOMMENDED]
Miscellaneous
Standard Calendar and Holidays [including month names!]
Galactic Standard Calendar [wookiepedia // including week day names]
Date converter according to SWTOR [Google sheet]
Hyperspace Travel Times (to calculate how much time would take to go from point A to point B within the GFFA)
Materials (fabrics, leathers, silks, plastics, construction, metal composites, etc.)
List of TCW Opening Quotes
Ship Generator 3D
Star Wars: The Clone Wars Republic Military Hierarchy Flowcharts by @cacodaemonia
Languages; Phrases and Slang; Vocabulary
Coruscant Translator (from/to Basic from/to Old Corellian, Proto-Basic, and Smuggler's Cant; Catharese and High Cathar; Cheunh and Minnisiat; Echani and Thyrsian; Mirialan; Flora Colossi, Ortolan, and -everyone's favorite- Mando'a)
In-Universe phrases and slang [Google sheet]
List of phrases and slang [wookiepedia]
List of equivalents to real-world objects [wookiepidia]
Star Wars Menu Generator
Helpful blogs
The amazing @fox-trot, who not only makes astonishing art and write an amazing fic, she also responds to medical questions and gives all kinds of references for writing medic characters.
@writebetterstarwars, which seems to be inactive, but there are a bunch of references there.
@howtofightwrite The place to find out how to write a good fight scene.
@scriptmedic no longer active, but it has a great deal of useful information.
@scripttorture for your whump needs. Major trigger warning for all its content.
Writing in General (For those who don't want to die like Stormtroopers)
SlickWrite: Completely free; online. Checks grammar, punctuation, flow, and writing style according to different settings (including fiction writing).
ProWritingAid: [RECOMMENDED] One of the most thorough online proofreader I've ever used. Although when using a free account gives extremely thorough feedback, it gives +20 different in-depth reports for only the first 500 words for free. However, you can earn a premium account license (for a year or for life) if you get 10 or 20 new users signing up for free; (if you wouldn't mind doing so using the link above and help me earn mine, please). The settings allow you to check your writing according to your needs, from general to formal to creative. It has a bonus that you can check depending on the genre you're writing. For example, in creative, you can choose romance or sci-fiction (there are 14 sub-genre in total). And just like google docs, you can share a document, and people can view, comment or edit.
LanguageTool: [RECOMMENDED] Another excellent proofreader. It also has a word limit in free accounts, but if you use the add-on for Google Docs, it counts each page as a new document, so hitting the limit is nearly impossible. It helps you to rewrite a sentence, even if it doesn't raise any flags; it's very useful for when your sentence is grammatically correct, but it doesn't feel quite right.
Grammarly, Hemingway Editor: No so great, but they do the basic job.
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OFMD characters as drivers
Ed: passenger princess. he can drive but someone always drives for him
Stede: obeys traffic laws until he doesn't. hits curbs. doesn't know what any of the lights mean on the inside of his car. pays for premium gas no matter how many times Ed tells him it's a scam and his car doesn't need it. probably gets a new car every year.
Izzy: the worst backseat driver and then drives like a fucking maniac. Yells at you if you don't hit the gas the second the light turns green. Gets into an accident at least once a year. Road rage. Probably had his license revoked.
Jack: chill ass awful driver. He's hotboxed his car so many times just breathing in there for a few minutes can get you high. cigarette butts everywhere. don't look in the glove compartment, it'll be something you wish you hadn't seen.
Olu: a good driver!
Jim: speed demon
Lucius: passenger princess, but unlike Ed he can't drive. never got his license. doesn't need it though
Pete: average kinda shitty driver who forgets to use his turn signals
Buttons: only takes the bus everywhere and is known to bus drivers and passengers citywide. some say he created the bus system
Roach: really good driver but will break the law. probably got emt training so he can swerve through traffic like no one's business when he has to
Frenchie: doesn't trust cars. Or buses. Walks, bikes, or trains everywhere. Whenever he has to get in a car he doesn't like it. the streets are full of evil
Wee John: idk what to say about Wee John. probably a normal driver
The Swede: can't drive. Not a passenger princess though. always has to ask for rides very shyly and usually ends up in the middle seat.
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Big Telco’s fury over FCC plan to infuse telecoms policy with facts
I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library on Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!
Reality has a distinct anti-conservative bias, but conservatives have an answer: when the facts don't support your policies, just get different facts. Who needs evidence-based policy when you can have policy-based evidence?
Take gun violence. Conservatives tell us that "an armed society is a polite society," which means that the more guns you have, the less gun violence you'll experience. To prevent reality from unfairly staining this pristine ideological mind-palace with facts, conservatives passed the Dickey Amendment, which had the effect of banning the CDC from gathering stats on American gun-violence. No stats, no violence!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment
Policy-based evidence is at the core of so many cherished conservative beliefs, like the idea that queer people (and not youth pastors) are responsible for the sexual abuse of children, or the idea that minimum wages (and not monopolies) decrease jobs, or the idea that socialized medicine (and not private equity) leads to death panels:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS
The Biden administration features a sizable cohort of effective regulators, whose job is to gather evidence and then make policy from it:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/#praxis
Fortunately for conservatives, not every Biden agency is led by competent, honest brokers – the finance wing of the Dems got to foist some of their most ghoulish members upon the American people, including a no-fooling cheerleader for mass foreclosure:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/06/personnel-are-policy/#janice-eberly
And these same DINOs reached across the aisle to work with Republicans to keep some of the most competent, principled agency leaders from being seated, like the remarkable Gigi Sohn, targeted by a homophobic smear campaign funded by the telco industry, who feared her presence on the FCC:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/19/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband/
The telcos are old hands at this stuff. Long before the gun control debates, Ma Bell had figured out that a monopoly over Americans' telecoms was a license to print money, and they set to corrupting agencies from the FCC to the DoJ:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/14/jam-to-day/
Reality has a vicious anti-telco bias. Think of Net Neutrality, the idea that if you pay an ISP for internet service, they should make a best effort to deliver the data you request, rather than deliberately slowing down your connection in the hopes that you'll seek out data from the company's preferred partners, who've paid a bribe for "premium delivery."
This shouldn't even be up for debate. The idea that your ISP should prioritize its preferred data over your preferred data is as absurd as the idea that a taxi-driver should slow down your rides to any pizzeria except Domino's, which has paid it for "premium service." If your cabbie circled the block twice every time you asked for a ride to Massimo's Pizza, you'd be rightly pissed – and the cab company would be fined.
Back when Ajit Pai was Trump's FCC chairman, he made killing Net Neutrality his top priority. But regulators aren't allowed to act without evidence, so Pai had to seek out as much policy-based evidence as he could. To that end, Pai allowed millions of obviously fake comments to be entered into the docket (comments from dead people, one million comments from @pornhub.com address, comments from sitting Senators who disavowed them, etc). Then Pai actively – and illegally – obstructed the NY Attorney General's investigation into the fraud:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/06/boogeration/#pais-lies
The pursuit of policy-based evidence is greatly aided by the absence of real evidence. If you're gonna fill the docket with made-up nonsense, it helps if there's no truthful stuff in there to get in the way. To that end, the FCC has systematically avoided collecting data on American broadband delivery, collecting as little objective data as possible:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/26/pandemic-profiteers/#flying-blind
This willful ignorance was a huge boon to the telcos, who demanded billions in fed subsidies for "underserved areas" and then just blew it on anything they felt like – like the $45 billion of public money they wasted on obsolete copper wiring for rural "broadband" expansion under Trump:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/27/all-broadband-politics-are-local/
Like other cherished conservative delusions, the unsupportable fantasy that private industry is better at rolling out broadband is hugely consequential. Before the pandemic, this meant that America – the birthplace of the internet – had the slowest, most expensive internet service of any G8 country. During the lockdown, broadband deserts meant that millions of poor and rural Americans were cut off from employment, education, health care and family:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/12/ajit-pai/#pai
Pai's response was to commit another $8 billion in public funds to broadband expansion, but without any idea of where the broadband deserts were – just handing more money over to monopoly telcos to spend as they see fit, with zero accountability:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/26/pandemic-profiteers/#flying-blind
All that changed after the 2020 election. Pai was removed from office (and immediately blocked me on Twitter) (oh, diddums), and his successor, Biden FCC chair Jessic Rosenworcel, started gathering evidence, soliciting your broadband complaints:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/23/parliament-of-landlords/#fcc
And even better, your broadband speed measurements:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#fly-my-pretties
All that evidence spurred Congress to act. In 2021, Congress ordered the FCC to investigate and punish discrimination in internet service provision, "based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin":
https://www.congress.gov/117/plaws/publ58/PLAW-117publ58.pdf
In other words, Congress ordered the FCC to crack down on "digital redlining." That's when historic patterns of underinvestment in majority Black neighborhoods and other underserved communities create broadband deserts, where internet service is slower and more expensive than service literally across the street:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/10/flicc/#digital-divide
FCC Chair Rosenworcel has published the agency's plan for fulfilling this obligation. It's pretty straightforward: they're going to collect data on pricing, speed and other key service factors, and punish companies that practice discrimination:
https://www.fcc.gov/document/preventing-digital-discrimination-broadband-internet-access
This has provoked howls of protests from the ISP cartel, their lobbying org, and their Republican pals on the FCC. Writing for Ars Technica, Jon Brodkin rounds up a selection of these objections:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/internet-providers-say-the-fcc-should-not-investigate-broadband-prices/
There's GOP FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, with a Steve Bannon-seque condemnation of "the administrative state [taking] effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the US. He's especially pissed that the FCC is going to regulate big landlords who force all their tenants to get slow, expensive from ISPs who offer kickbacks to landlords:
https://www.fcc.gov/document/carr-opposes-bidens-internet-plan
The response from telco lobbyists NCTA is particularly, nakedly absurd: they demand that the FCC exempt price from consideration of whether an ISP is practicing discrimination, calling prices a "non-technical aspect of broadband service":
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/110897268295/1
I mean, sure – it's easy to prove that an ISP doesn't discriminate against customers if you don't ask how much they charge! "Sure, you live in a historically underserved neighborhood, but technically we'll give you a 100mb fiber connection, provided you give us $20m to install it."
This is a profoundly stupid demand, but that didn't stop the wireless lobbying org CTIA from chiming in with the same talking points, demanding that the FCC drop plans to collect data on "pricing, deposits, discounts, and data caps," evaluation of price is unnecessary in the competitive wireless marketplace":
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1107735021925/1
Individual cartel members weighed in as well, with AT&T and Verizon threatening to sue over the rules, joined by yet another lobbying group, USTelecom:
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1103655327582/1
The next step in this playbook is whipping up the low-information base by calling this "socialism" and mobilizing some of the worst-served, most-gouged people in America to shoot themselves in the face (again), to own the libs:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/#unrequited-love
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/10/digital-redlining/#stop-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts
Image:
Japanexperterna.se (modified)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanexperterna/15251188384/
CC BY-SA 2.0:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
--
Mike Mozart (modified)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/14325839070/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/14325905568/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/14489390566/
www.ccPixs.com
https://www.flickr.com/photos/86530412@N02/8210762750/
CC BY 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
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