Thanks to
Elf Sternberg, I've caught the meme to analyze your writing style with the automated tool on the
I Write Like website. Elf fed in a whole bunch of different stories and found that the tool gave different results based on what stories you feed into it.
I observed a similar effect. For example, if I feed in the first two chapters of
FROST MOON, I write like
David Foster Wallace, author of
Infinite Jest:
However, feed in
FROST MOON chapters 3 and 4, and I become
James Joyce, author of
Ulysses:
How complimentary! (And apropos, given that Ulysses is one of the favorite books of Cinnamon Frost, a major character in the SKINDANCER books).
However, when I put in something completely different, like my science fiction story "
Sibling Rivalry", I get ... perhaps unsurprisingly ... something completely different:
I'm speechless. I think I will go out on that note.
No. That's not quite honest. I have to do one more.
From the current draft of SPELLPUNK: HEX CODE, narrated by Cinnamon Frost, broken English and all:
Well. I still feel highly complimented:
Margaret Atwood, author of
The Handmaid's Tale, is "among the
most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award seven times, winning twice." Wow. What company.
Not sure what that says when the most award winning author of recent memory was the best match for a chapter written entirely in broken English. Maybe ... keep doing what I'm doing?
Or maybe, just maybe, don't put too much stock into computer algorithms.
-the Centaur
UPDATE: thanks to the magic of comments, I've found the
I Actually Write Like website, a "highly advanced statistical analysis tool which was actually genuinely written by a guy with a real PhD which has some statistics," which gives this verdict on SPELLPUNK: HEX CODE:
I actually write like
an adolescent goth after a heavy night on the absinthe
I Actually Write Like Analyze your writing!
NOW we're talking! And STILL highly accurate! Let's try FROST MOON again:
Even more accurate! Actually, since the Cinnamon Frost speech is like a lolcat, and FROST MOON is gothy, I strongly suspect a random number generator somewhere in there. :-) However (after a brief application of the
scientific method) results seem to be consistent from run to run. That
intertest reliability suggests a
deterministic algorithm. HOWEVER (after a brief application of a
sources of power analysis) extremely small changes to the text result ... deleting the first word ... result in completely different outcomes, so I suspect the
text is being hashed into a
fortune file. Changing the final word addition to the first word still shows this
sensitivity to initial conditions, ruling out an analogue of the
primacy effect caused by taking the
head of the file.
Procrastination. It's a wonderful thing.
