Yes, I have a new book to announce; yes, there is a twist in the plot. But no, there is no twist in the book’s plot! In fact, the book has no plot.
It doesn’t have characters, either.
The twist in the plot in announcing this new book is that it’s a nonfiction book.
I don’t know what kind of demon drove me – refer to George Orwell’s quote decorating the main page of Home for Fiction – but I decided to write a complete guide on writing quality fiction.
The result – somewhat anticlimactically, after the previous sentence – is The Complete Writer: a Guide to Writing Better Fiction.
Clicking on the photo (or on this link) takes you to the Amazon page, where you can read a free preview and purchase The Complete Writer. If you can’t afford the book and look to get it for free, keep reading this post
No, in case you thought this post contains answers to all your (existential) questions, I’ll disappoint you. It only contains my answers to the questions you asked me for the Home for Fiction contest we recently had; contest results, in other words!
I got quite a few questions – thank you all! – perhaps even a bit more than I expected. In case you missed the whole thing, the contest worked so that you could ask me a question related to my writing, the blog, etc., and then I would pick the five most interesting ones to answer. From these, I’d randomly pick three that would win Amazon gift cards, valued at $10, $20, and $30.
Well, as I said, it’s contest results time! Before we proceed to the answers, a couple of notes:
Since I shared the contest page with friends and acquaintances online, I inevitably got questions from people I already knew. This did not affect my choice of questions…
… and as for the Amazon gift cards, the process was entirely automated. I coded a JavaScript-based name picker to randomly get three names. If you’re interested in its details, the code is available at the end of this post.
With these in mind, let’s take a look at the contest results!
For the past couple of months I’ve been working on a rather ambitious project. Ambition is often misunderstood, but the way I choose to approach it, it’s about doing something “just because”. It was in this “fuck it” framework that Book Worming Party, my latest programming project came to being.
Book Worming Party – even the name should tell you how mad this project is – combines three of my interests: literature, visuality, and programming. What can I say, I’m a talented man (and above all, modest).
Book Worming Party is a program (written mostly in JavaScript) that takes a work of fiction and, based on calculations and interpretations it makes about its nature, turns it into semi-random visual art. It translates words into color, plot into shapes, genre into affect. There are no separate “kinds of art”; art is art.
