Playing with words.

Finally – a slightly more personal post after so long! (Aaron Ho would be pleased.)

While I was in Bali, I worked on a short story when there wasn’t any sightseeing to be done. After finishing a draft of the story, however, I realised it read more like the Chapter One of a novella. That’s fine too, I guess, but I don’t know how long it’ll take me to finish writing that.

In any case, I’ve just finished tweaking the draft a bit and I thought I’d check if I’d used any words too many times. Apart from being a fun tool to play around with, Wordle helps quite a bit here.

The picture you see above is a word cloud of the story – the greater the number of times a word is used, the bigger the font size of the word in the cloud.

It seemed I used ‘around’ a bit too much as a preposition, so I modified some occurrences. ‘Toward’ has the next highest hit, but it’s harder to replace the word.

I’ll post the story/Chapter One up when I’m done getting feedback on it and editing it. Merry Christmas, everyone and have a Happy New Year!