Monday, July 19, 2010

I write like

Since everyone I know is trying it out, I threw in a bunch of different excerpts:

opening of Chimps & Blimps (novel using setting & characters of Transmontane Run) - Margaret Atwood

opening of "On the Transmontane Run with the Aerial Mail Express" - Mark Twain

opening of unfinished Boxer Rebellion story - Mark Twain (damn! I was aiming for Kipling)

cut scene from The Willow Knot - Neil Gaiman

opening of The Cost of Silver - James Joyce

2d chapter of Trading in Ghosts - James Joyce

opening of Bookwyrms - H.P. Lovecraft

opening of Children of Mercury - Dan Brown

opening of unfinished True Heir story - Rudyard Kipling

I think the program is using keywords, rather than anything really diagnostic like sentence length and complexity, paragraphing, etc.

Bookwyrms is written quite straightforwardly but includes the words 'curse' and 'shamanic'. The cut scene (a couple of entries below, actually) has 'charms', the opening of Transmontane has 'I reckon' and 'tall tales', the Trading in Ghosts chapter has some bad words, and Mercury is set in a medieval Italian painter's studio (though there are no codes and Leonardo hasn't been born yet).

2 comments:

Terri-Lynne said...

Apparently, it's random. Jim Macdonald did a very JIM expose on Making Light (that I saw through Debra's LJ.) It's a lure for naive new writers to buy some service or another. Did you see that?

batgirl said...

I noticed the link before but figured it was just a google ad - I'll have to check out the Making Light post.

Disappointing, anyways. Harrumph.