wordle

Current work: Revisions
Listening to: Travis and The Calling
Reading: next on TBR pile

Having a slight sulk here as I was hoping to see Comet Lulin this week. But we’ve had cloudy skies, so the chance of seeing a green blur of 5.2 magnitude (i.e. bright enough to see it with the naked eye, though not as good as Hale-Bopp was back in 1997) is zero. Mutter, mutter.

Anyway. Time for distraction.

Ever wanted a quick way to find out what your book’s really about? Go here and you can find out – because it generates a word-cloud, which picks out the words you use most frequently. The bigger the word, the more often you use it.

A procrastination device? Actually, no. It can show you themes. For example, the three biggest words from a wordle based on my blog for this month are ‘read’, ‘reading’ and ‘book’. Not surprising for an author’s blog. And when I put in the text for Gio, it came up with ‘work’ and ‘family’ – yup, those were two of the big themes, i.e. how to balance them.

It can also show you words that you use way too much. I did it for my Norway book. As I expected, my hero and heroine’s names are prominent. But so were a couple of words I didn’t expect (and I need to do a search-and-replace to see where I can remove a few of them). (All right. The word ‘just’ was a biggie – just (!!) as it was in Breakfast at Giovanni’s, and my new Sheikh. Incidentally, so were words to do with sight and touch. This confirms my theory that romance novels contain a lot of hand-and-eye stuff, because they’re describing courtship – which involves hand-and-eye stuff, yes?)

So your mission for today, should you choose to accept it: go play on Wordle, then come back here and tell me what you learned about your WIP or your blog. (A link to a post on your blog is fine. An enquiring mind (aka Kate Nosey) needs regular breaks from hard graft.)

Plan for today: guitar lesson (moved from Tuesday because I had intended to make huge cuts on the book) and then back to revisions. The more I think I’ve cracked it, the more I seem to cut: as of last night, I had 7,652 new words. (And there are more to come.) I need a time machine...

Edit: I almost forgot! (Mixture of the fact that I'm on deadline and therefore a different planet, and there's a time difference involved...) I'm blogging over at The Writing Playground today. Books are up for grabs. Come over and say hello!