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Plot Generator and Writing Prompt App for Android

March 4, 2019

Android, app, computer, programming, writing

Looking for a more creativity-based solution? Try Story Dice, a program I recently made.

Please note that none of my Android apps is any longer maintained – and they’re not even available on Google Play anymore – for reasons you can read about here. If you still have any of the Home for Fiction Android apps installed on your phone, you’re advised to uninstall them. The post below should be seen purely as a snapshot of history.

After finishing my ambitious Mansion Escape text adventure app, I thought to make something a little simpler. The Plot Generator and Writing Prompt app is a simple, lightweight app for Android that helps writers come up with new ideas. This writing prompt app, as the name implies, offers authors an idea to work and expand on. Effectively, it produces a short text containing what is a plot description of sorts. You can think of it as the back cover of a book.

The generated text consists of a basic structure (common in all generated combinations) and a set of randomized items, such as protagonist and antagonist names, gender, character attributes, occupation, field of narrative tension, and others.

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Authors Talk: a Discussion with Bryce Paradis and Evan Coupland

February 20, 2019

Author Interview, Literature

author, Bryce Paradis, Evan Coupland, fiction, interview, literature, writing

This article is a part of a series of blog entries, which I refer to as “Authors Talk”. You can think of it as an author interview and, indeed, that is the name of the blog category. However, I prefer to see it as a friendly chat between fellow authors. Today I’m having this virtual chat with Bryce Paradis and Evan Coupland, authors of Stories from the Nation of Wisland.

Or, to be more precise, I’m having a chat with them having a chat; an interview of them interviewing each other; a meta-interview. I don’t know what to call it, things are never simple with Bryce Paradis and Evan Coupland. Of course, this is what makes Stories from the Nation of Wisland such a remarkable text to begin with.

You can find a detailed list of useful links to their work at the end of this article.

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Optimal Word Count: Dos and Don’ts

January 9, 2019

Writing

narrative, publishing, word count, writing

If you take a look around you, you’ll discover we’re obsessed with measuringFor more on this, take a look at my article on measuring success. Your camera is this many megapixels, your phone has this many gigabytes of RAM. It’s no surprise that texts – novels, essays, and blog articles – fall victim to the same process. But what is an optimal word count for a given text?

In today’s article I’ll… Well, let’s be unusual and start from the end: I’ll eventually give you some tips on how to calculate the optimal word count for your novel (though probably it won’t be what you expect). But before that, I will talk a bit about word counts.

I’ll explain why I think optimal word counts are overrated. Furthermore, I’ll show you why becoming preoccupied with having the “right” word count for your novel might be counterproductive.

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