\http://earth.google.com/  (this is a site that allows you to view and zoom into places of the world which you may not be familiar with. an excellent tool if your unfamiliar with an area that you want to sound familiar with. 

 

 

http://watchout4snakes.com/creativitytools/RandomWord/RandomWordPlus.aspx ( I can't get the link to come up on this but this is the web address, or you can just google "online random word generator plus." It basically just creates random words, but you can get very specific with them, such as nouns, verbs or adjectives. Also, you can create random paragraphs with pre-assigned words. I've used this alot when I have writer's block and just can't think of ways to progress a story or can't figure out a creative way to word something.

 

 

http://www.nicefacts.com/ ( I used this web site a few times in my story. It has thousands of facts about random things. I noticed that I  could take some of these facts and use them to dictate which direction my story was going to go in. It also ended up being a very integral part of my character's internal monologue. He was constantly saying related facts to things in the story.