Yes, I Still Have A Book In Progress

[rax]

At the risk of being seriously memetacular, a couple people have posted these already and they are wonderful. This is a Wordle of the top 150 words in the current build of my novel; yes, fellow nerds, my novel has a Makefile. (And it's stored in svk.) If you've read any of the chapters then you will know why certain words appear so frequently; if not, well, feel free to guess. I am actually really hoping to get more of it done over my long West Coast trip; much of the book takes places on the West Coast and I need to get it, especially San Francisco, under my feet again.

A teaser from a bit into the currently-first chapter:

The little fluffy clouds turned into bigger fluffy clouds, drifting slowly in from the ocean.
She tried to find patterns in the clouds, remembering children’s television shows of child
actors mimicking characters in a Fifties picture book looking up at a tri-tone sky and saying
“That one looks like a cat!” “That one looks like a train!” They looked like freaking clouds,
Katherine thought. She wondered if maybe she could get a job taking the magic out of
the lives of children, being the opposite of Santa Claus. She wondered where she was going
to get dinner. She wondered whether the mother who was ushering away two children was
ushering them away from her, or just away.

She wondered until the fringes of the sky started to turn orange, and she started to get
cold, and then she stopped wondering, and started wandering, leaving the wrought-iron gate
open behind her, in case her mother wanted to follow her home.

Maybe she did miss her mother, just a little bit. She hoped.

Comments

[friode.livejournal.com]

Can't you just do something like

tr ' ' '\n' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

and skip all this Web 2.0 stuff?

[rax.livejournal.com]

It would lack the cool picture, and probably pick up lots of \LaTeX tags. :)

[kelkyag]

I'm surprised that "lied" is so low-profile. :)

[rax.livejournal.com]

I'm very suprised "capers" doesn't show up! But this is only half of what will end up being the first draft, I think, so I am not terribly surprised.

[aerynne.livejournal.com]

I was thinking exactly the same thing! "Shouldn't lied be bigger than said?"

[kayunderscore.livejournal.com]

I like this Katherine character already. I hope you'll post more :)

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Nice hook. Very evocative, and I want to know more about Katherine already.

I'm catching a whiff of an allusion to the young Mary Shelly and her relationship with her mother's grave — is that deliberate?

[rax.livejournal.com]

Not an intentional allusion, but it might have been in the back of my mind. I will have to do more research and find out :)
(And yesssss! It was clear she was on a grave even though that excerpt doesn't mention it. Excellent.)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

So... it's about Katherine, Simon, and the things they didn't say, judging from the graphic.

[rax.livejournal.com]

Yeah, pretty much, though I still have to write the things that they did say, and the book also covers the things that they didn't do. Think Dubliners, but in the late 1990s and all the depressing stories are about the same people.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

She wondered if maybe she could get a job taking the magic out of
the lives of children, being the opposite of Santa Claus.

Fond of this. Also, your Wordle is cool-- I need to do me one of those.

[seth99rb.livejournal.com]

when are we getting tatted????