I saw a link to Wordle and decided to try it out with the short story I wrote recently that goes along with the series I’ve been working on for a few years. The top image is from Wordle. Then I saw a link to Text Is Beautiful and decided to try that out, too- that’s the bottom one. I think I like the second one best because it eliminates a lot of superfluous simple words.

These came out pretty neat! I’m happy with the words it picked out, so I must have used them with the right frequency. There are only two characters in the story, so their names ended up super large. The plot is about an imp adjusting to human society, so “human” comes up a lot. “Feed” and “food” are because he feeds off of magic, which he calls “glow”, and come from mages, which he calls “sparklers”. He has a slight obsession with coins and words since both baffle him, so those came up pretty large. I also love that at least the second one got “fire” and “stage” because Firedrake is a fire dancer. Some of the smaller words in the second one is how Talan recognizes Firedrake: arms (tattoos- kind of surprised that word didn’t make it), hair, and voice, as well as Firedrake’s body language (eyes, hands, lips, and smile come up in the list). I’m glad it caught these because a big thing about Talan is how he’s terrible at telling humans apart- except for Firedrake.

I think the first one has “Firedrake’s” larger than “Talan’s” because I often use “Firedrake’s” instead of a pronoun. Drake’s pronoun is “they” in this story (although I think I’m using “ze” in the novels), so to avoid confusion with they-plural, I tend to use a name. Talan just gets “his”, so it made the instances of “Talan’s” less.

I picked reds for the color theme because Firedrake wouldn't let me have it any other way. Talan didn't care because he can only see the world in variations of greys. ;)

~Meri