101 best sites for writers

Each year Writer's Digest publishes its list of 101 best sites for writers.  Did you miss the 2008 list? Not a problem.  You can read it, and follow all the links, on the Writer's Digest website.  Just google "101 best sites," which will also you give the bonus of a link to PC Magazine's list of best websites.

Looking for a comfortable New Year's resolution?  One that's productive, easy to keep, and does not require giving up any of those wonderful guilty pleasures that we love to indulge?  Resolve to visit one new site for writers each week.  Bookmark the ones you would visit again and put them in a favorites folder in your browser.  At the end of 2009  you will have 52 new sites.  Chances are you will find others on your own.  

If you're more ambitious, resolve to visit one new site for writers each day ... knock yourself out.  Or one a month ... this is not a competition, and it's your life.  

Speaking of guilty pleasures, here's a writing-related site that didn't make the Writer's Digest list (and another chance for me to use my favorite verb, "google").  Just google "HotForWords" and visit Marina Orlova's classroom.  Marina, an outrageously attractive Russian English teacher living in the United States, is one of the biggest hits on YouTube.  Her short video lessons on the origins of words are both entertaining and instructional.  At her site you can click on "Words/Lessons" to see a word list and watch the videos.  If all English teachers were like Marina, we would all have great vocabularies, or we would all be too distracted to learn anything.

I wish you all a creative 2009.  Keep writing!  And reading!