"Mom, I’m bored." "Frieda, you said you wanted to come on watch with me tonight." "Yeah, but that’s because War of the Elements starts tonight, I thought we’d be doing something fun, like aiming the rockets or maybe I could ride the lookout kite. I didn’t think we’d just be sitting up here looking around." … [Read more…]
Andrew the Kind, Paladin of Charity, gasped quietly – a new scroll in the temple’s tiny library! He looked up guiltily in case his utterance had disturbed the librarian outside. Quiet was enforced so as not to disturb contemplation. Outside the little temple, the ancient city sprawled like a serpent coiled against the mountains along … [Read more…]
“Precipitation” Ebenezer Stover was checking over his merchandise at the Venison Heights “Genral Stor” (as his sign on the front of the building said), when he looked out through the propped-open front door and saw the storm coming. He called out through the back window to his wife, puttering about in her garden. “Gladys? Looks … [Read more…]
I think I’ll start posting some of my dorky fantasy fiction up here in hopes that people will read it and tell me how I suck (so that I can practice not-sucking better). I’ve been writing little “slice of life” sorts of things for the setting I’ve been developing, so I particularly would be interested … [Read more…]
And now, some less obvious observations on the findings from my investigation into generic fantasy-fiction titles. But first, for anyone that wants it, here’s a spreadsheet with my raw counts (OpenDocumentSpreadsheet [.ods] format). The first column is the word or concept being counted (if it’s got parentheses around it, it’s a label I made up … [Read more…]
As mentioned in the previous post, I spent some time tediously adding up the word frequencies from the 2500 “Bestselling” fantasy book titles from Barnes and Noble to get aggregate scores for particular concepts, along with noticing a few other possibly-interesting facts as I did so. By the end of this post, you should have … [Read more…]
“Dark”. For years now it’s seemed to me like every fantasy novel, movie, tv show, etc. were titled with the same handful of words. I finally got around to doing some empirical investigation to see if it’s true. I wrote a script to “scrape” the results of a major online bookseller’s 2500 or so “Bestselling” … [Read more…]