Monday, July 26, 2010

Random Thoughts Monday: Still of kids and madness

One week of kids' break down, and my sanity is AWOL. Okay, didn't expect it to be here too much, but still... Not a pleasant feeling to be so in the clouds half the time. True too, no way of coping with kids otherwise. Work at a standstill, though research did happen for the book. Amazing how sometimes your characters will just spring something on you and off you go, needing to make sure you'll get your info right. Yes, motorcycles, but not just - heroine has also let the cat out of the bag that she has a jewellery fetish. Precious stones actually. Now I need to work that into the story/plan.



Other than the research, weekend was pretty ok. Stayed in most of the time 'coz the weatehr is just back to be wintery awful again. Got a break on Saturday as my mom all but threw the red carpet out to the kiddo. Hubby and I ended up with a evening and a morning alone after ages. That was indeed pleasant - rekindling  a relationship is often as sweet as establishing one in those very early, heady days. Yes, romance was in the air... :) Then too, I always maintained that real romance takes work - you work at keeping a relationship alive. It takes guts, making a few mistakes, making a lot of compromises, and giving lots of trust, love and acceptance to be a real life heroine. Or hero too, for that matter!



With focus back on the real-real life (understand by that, kiddo back home yesterday!), life's drifting by into its usual array of to-do list and what else other chore.
Thank goodness for some mindless distractions then. First up, the Internet! What can you not find on the web? I was watching Click on the BBC the other day and their web address section had this site up as a feature - Wordle. Strangely, lol, I also find this site featured on a fellow writer's blog the next day (Annie Nicholas).

Now what is Wordle? It's a web-based tool that analyzes the prominence of word usage in a specific text and then puts up the result up in a tag cloud form that looks quirky and fun. Check the one I did for this blog:


Now, lol, I had no idea the word Fisher was even on the site, let alone so prominently! Annie on her post mentioned this could be a really nice tool for writers. How? Well, none of us are immune to echoes or crutch words. This tool could identify them.
Next up - what are the most prominent concepts in your story? The tag cloud will show you which words appear more. Some will stand out (just like Characters stood out in my above tag cloud). Now what if you take those words to find your main points, and from there trickle down your tag lines, blurb, and synop?

Okay too - Wordle is totally addictive! You can customize and change basically everything in the way the results look. There's the option to upload/paste your own text (say, for your WIP) and you can also get the app to analyze your website/blog (like I did with my blog). Check it out, it's really astounding!



From Mauritius with love,

Zee

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

hiya.Is that weather you wanted to type there:)