I didn't steal your name - I just like it.

Another fun thing about being a writer is getting to name characters.

Now, if you're writing Game of Thrones, you can get creative and just push and pull a few letters around to make new, unique monikers for your characters.  But my preference is for 'ordinary' names (most of the time) and to that end, I spend hours searching through baby name databases, finding names with just the right feel to them.

Unfortunately, the longer you're alive, the more likely you are to meet and make friends with people who share names with your characters.  And that can be a bit awkward.

I don't know what it's like for someone to read a book where the character shares their name as it's never happened to me.  But when a book that's been in the works for months - or, often, years - is published and it's filled with your friends' names, you have to wonder how it'll feel to them.  Even if you try and avoid using names of people you know, at some point that just becomes limiting.

In the universe I draw from, character names and even characters cross between worlds, take on different roles and appear in each others' stories.

This is part of a larger multiverse where multiple sets of characters live out their lives and adventures in altered versions of the same world.

In one version of the universe, werewolves and vampires are real.  In another, the concept of vamparism is real but is caused by a disease.  In other universes, supernatural beings only exist as ideas or hallucinations and occasionally, no one drinks blood at all.

So, to all the folks who find their names turning up in my books time and time again - I didn't steal your names, I promise.  The character models come from this infinite multiverse and those names came from the land of the internet.

Evaluating Style Writer 4

So, in my hunt for better editing tools to help speed up the process of refining my writing, I stumbled upon (or perhaps I read it somewhere), a piece of software called Style Writer.

Style Writer is great.  It scores you on all the important parts of your writing, which for anyone who enjoys gamification of life, is quite addictive.

Scoring categories include Bog (how often you mention wet soil in your novel), Passive (whether or not your characters hit other characters), Style (general fashion sense), Jargon (I can't think of anything witty to say about this one) and gives you an overall grade.

All sad puns aside, one of the most useful checking tools it offers is looking for signs of over-writing, which are characterised by bog or glue.  These are words that are used to hold sentences together but which don't offer much in the way of moving things forward.  The more bog and glue you have in your sentence, the longer it takes to make your point... the less attention your reader's going to pay.

For instance, an example of a sentence that needs tidying might be:

She stood still in the cold, dark night, breathing in shallow gasps, wondering how long it would take for the narrator to make a point.

Well, we could just have her standing in the dark.  After all, if your'e standing somewhere, you're generally not prancing about, so my telling you that that she stood still is irrelevant - as is probably the fact that it's cold and that it's dark because it's night.  So you start to see how you can shave words off to make your point.

My natural instinct is to over-write, so I like Style Writer's no-nonsense analysis.  You can't argue with an algorithm.  Well, you can, but you'd better do it succinctly.

Style Writer also looks for passive verbs and overused words such as 'nice' and you can add in new patterns to check for if you know you have particular stylistic tendencies.  For instance, I talk waaaay too much about eyes if I'm not careful.  The trick is to make sure anything you do in your writing is intentional, adds to your voice or the vibe you're trying to create, and doesn't pull readers out of the story to ask themselves 'why the hell do you keep going on about his eyes?'.

It grades your sentence length, checks for sexist comments (yes, seriously) and gives you everything in an easy-to-read pane that highlights whichever elements you want to check for, colour coded to their category.

It's not perfect - as with MS Word's grammar checker, it often highlights words that are correctly used and suggests alternatives.  This refers to the 'confused word' category, where folks might use lie and lay interchangeably or confuse its with it's.  More often than not, I find its suggestions are flat out wrong.  But the developers do ask for feedback and are adding to the software on a regular basis, so I'm hoping this is something that will improve over time.

I'll spend a few more days putting it through its paces, as I haven't used anything like it before, but I think this might be the one for me.  Licences are only $150 USD for one, and another $30 to add additional licences for a laptop or other work station.

At first blush, the only thing I would ask them to add is perhaps some achievements you can unlock (I scored Excellent in BOG!)  so that you can post your success to Facebook, because who doesn't want to do that? - And perhaps to re-skin it so that it looks less 1994 and more Age of Apps.  But many of the writing tools out there do have that ye-olde-world feel and I guess it doesn't affect how it performs.  It's just my preference to have things look shiny.

So, there's my blog post run through Style Writer.  I wonder how Style Writer will score me?  (For the purposes of this experiment, I haven't edited this post to tidy it up).

The Report #stylewriter4

I WANT to believe...

Beta Reading, Everybody

So, the 'final' draft of Just Drink (the name is now finalised) has been distributed to my kind and attentive Beta readers for their feedback and some final checks.  I've vowed to put the book down for a couple of weeks and come back to it once some initial feedback comes in and then start to do the final tidy.  This will be the final tidy before publication.

The cover has been created.  The ISBN has been registered.  The next three books in the series have been drafted and some initial talking-book samples have been created to see if it'd work in that format for another project.

Breathing space is... terrifying.  I'll admit, writing is a little like a drug habit and the ringing silence that follows when you put down your metaphorical pen (or pipe or whatever, I'm just mixing up this metaphor as much as possible here) is actually quite disturbing.

For a full year I've lived with these characters, exploring their motivation and living their emotional lives with them.  It's like watching a TV series, in a way, one that's fully immersive and when it's done, you don't quite know what to do with yourself.

Thankfully, I have other hobbies (obsessions), one of which is singing, another is composing and my next project will likely be purchasing some decent composing software and sound libraries and starting on that journey.  This'll complement the talking-book project.

And then there's the art - my passion for Anime has spilled into a desire to be able to create my own characters, so there's that.

But for all the waffle above, the key takeaway is (not sweet and sour pork, no), is that the book is essentially finished.  I believe it'll be ready for the Amazon and Kobo marketplaces by the end of June.

And then, there will be cake.