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GhostWriter: a Random Text Generator App for Android

July 17, 2018

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.

I recently talked about the importance of learning how to learn. I spoke of how knowledge should be holistic, with each learned discipline or area of knowledge supporting the rest. Well, let me ask you: Can a guy with a PhD in English literature design Android apps? The answer is GhostWriter, a random text generator Android app I developed.

Long-term readers of this blog probably know that I enjoy programming, particularly when it’s related to writing and literature. Besides my genre-marking JavaScript program, I’ve also experimented with an iambic pentameter generator. Ghostwriter is an app of a similar kind, that is, one concerned with writing and texts.

How Does a Random Text Generator Work?

The GhostWriter app deploys the RiTa library (probably well known to developers). It can generate text based on Markov chain creation. In very simple terms, the program scans some pre-installed texts (mostly older, out-of-copyright novels) and detects how words follow one another.

For example, if there are two phrases like “The black cat went into the market” and “the white dog went into the store”, the app can mix them so that a new, randomly generated phrase emerges: “The black dog went into the market”.

Of course these are only two very simplistic examples. With literally thousands and thousands of combinations, a random text generator can produce some wild results. Here’s just one funny example from A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens:

GhostWriter - random text generator — Charles Dickens must be rolling over in his grave. Or, who knows, perhaps he’d find it hilarious and entertaining.

Authors Talk: A Discussion with Jessica Titone

May 16, 2018

Author Interview, Literature

author, fiction, interview, Jessica Titone, literature, writing

A Discussion with Jessica Titone: Introduction

This article is a part of a new 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 Jessica Titone, author of Watermarked, a fine example of modern literary fiction (you can read my review of Watermarked here). A detailed list of useful links to Jessica Titone’s work can be found at the end of this article.

A Discussion with Jessica Titone: General

Chris Angelis: Let’s first hear a couple of words about you as an author. Give us some background information: what kind of books do you write, for how long have you been a writer, and anything else you think readers would find interesting.

Jessica Titone: I’m contemporary fiction writer by nature, currently dipping my toes in to test the waters of YA Fantasy. If reading were a sport, I would do it competitively, but I’m the slowest writer in the entire world. Probably because I suffer from rampant perfectionism.

I’ve been a writer forever. It’s always been second nature for me.
– Jessica Titone

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The Future of Poetry (and why It Is Bleak)

May 13, 2018

Writing

literature, mediocrity, poetry, writing

Matthew Arnold has made a famous, as-of-yet-unfulfilled prediction regarding the future of poetry.

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay … Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact.

What Matthew Arnold failed to take into consideration was the paralyzing mediocrity that has overwhelmed this world. Not only has poetry not eclipsed religion (perhaps the term ‘dogma’ is easier to grasp in this context), but it has indeed become virtually extinct itself. The future of poetry looks grim, because the future of humanity looks grim itself.

the future of poetry — The future of poetry is bleak in a world of mediocrity

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