“The Tyranny of the Hungry Bookkeeper” Posted

This week’s writing exercise was "The Tyranny of the Hungry Bookkeeper".  A writer fears the approach of the bookkeeper.

This project took longer than I had hoped. The heat wave and then the smoke from the forest fires tended to suck the energy out of me. I did get it written fairly quickly, but then found it hard to get it recorded. After the heat died down a bit, they started a construction project in the street in front of my house. The noise was too loud to record.

I finally got it recorded and posted though. Unfortunately, as I prepared this post, I realized that I had misspelled “tearannny”. (I didn’t misspell it that badly though).

I had to fix that before I shared.

I posted it on sound cloud:

https://soundcloud.com/dynamiclethargy/the-tyranny-of-the-hungry-bookkeeper

Over the next week or so, I hope to set up an audio page on my website with links to my recordings.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Random Title Generator Upgrade

I created a random title generator a while back that I could use to generate ideas for writing exercises. I wasn’t happy with it, so this week I made a bunch of improvements.

 https://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/random-title-generator/

In the writer’s group I joined we used a random prompt generator to come up with ideas for our writing exercise. My earlier attempt was meant to come up with a better version of that. I was not successful.

While the earlier version of my generator worked, the titles it generated were a disappointment. It worked from three word lists: a random article (i.e.: The or A), a random adjective and a random noun. It had no trouble picking random words, but the list of words I didn’t do a very good job of picking the words to use.

I began by redoing the list of nouns. I threw out the list I had and started over. First, I added a list of occupation descriptions I found on the Internet. That gave me a list of 300 words. Then, inspired by that, I added other words that describe people. I also added a few animals. I ended up with 527 words.

Next, I replaced the list of adjectives. I’m not sure where I got the initial set of adjectives. Once I had that, I added more based on the words I’d already added. That gave me 411 adjectives.

Then I worked on the list of articles. In my earlier version of the generator, I just used words like “the”, “A”, “Some” and a couple others. I had been reading some Perry Mason books recently and they inspired me to use the opening formula for those, which was “The Case of the”. I generated replacements for the word “case” and ended up with 196 words.

One problem is that these openings aren’t really articles anymore. I couldn’t think of a more appropriate word, so I just left it as that.

With these word lists, the title generator can create 42,453,012 different titles. In testing I found that it still would produce some titles that didn’t make sense. However, that was less of a problem than my earlier version.

The feedback so far has been positive. It does seem that most of the titles come across as mystery/detective stories. The problem was that when I was putting them together, my thoughts tended toward a mystery/detective story. I think I should come up with some other openings that suggest other types of stories.

The title generator had three buttons to generate the title: “Random Article”, “Random Adjective” and “Random Person”. One of the people in my writer’s group suggested that I also have a button that generated a whole new title. I added that.

I've put the generator on my website instead of being on its own like before. https://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/random-title-generator/

I did a writing exercise based on a title from the updated version of the title generator: "The Tyranny of the Hungry Bookkeeper". I haven't recorded it yet.

I am open to making further changes to the generator. If you have any, please get in touch. I can send you the word lists and the html code I used if you want to create your own title generator. I may go ahead and post links to them on the generator page.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

“The Secret City”

I posted another recording of a writing exercise on Soundcloud. I describe it as a scientist searches for a secret city.

I’ve been part of a writer’s group for several years now. At every session we do a writing exercise. We start with a random prompt. It is usually a title. We each then have 30 minutes to do our exercise. When the time is up, each of us reads the exercise we’ve written.

If time runs short, then I will do a writing exercise on my own. That is what happened after our last session.

The prompt title was “The Imaginary Gun”. I got a finished piece is just under 30 minutes. A couple days later, I went to record it, so I could share it with the other people in the group. As I reread the story, I started to feel very uncomfortable with the implied message of the story. It didn’t fit with my personal views.

I have always followed the rule that I don’t rewrite my exercises. It was a struggle for me to decide what to do about it. I didn’t like what I had but didn’t want to rewrite it. In any event, it would have been difficult to change the message. I considered doing a fresh writing exercise with the same prompt title.

In the end, I decided to pick a new prompt title and do a new story.

The new title was “The Secret City”. I may have gone “a few seconds” over the 30-minute time limit. Even so, it was shorter than some of my other exercises.

I recorded it using Audacity. For some reason I had trouble speaking some of the lines and had to retry them until I got something I felt was OK. In one case it took me 5 attempts. I had to edit those out.

I had three speaking characters. Two were male, so I used a plug-in called Rovee in Audacity to alter my voice. The other was female. In that case I used a website called https://voicemaker.in/ to generate a female voice. I picked a Chinese voice. The website also allows you to modify how individual words are spoken. I used that to put emphasis on some words. I changed the pitch of some words as well.

I finally got the recording posted on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/dynamiclethargy/the-secret-city

As I thought over the story later, I wondered if I could develop it into a longer piece. I think the female character could be interesting.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog