Teehee – A New Feature AND Way to Monitor Progress…

I shamelessly stole this from my good friend Ms. Tracy Brown at Write On! She used to do these word cloud things and I thought they were tres cool looking – then I realized I can use them as progress monitors/trackers too, and thus a new J-E.com feature was born: Word Cloud Thursday. I don’t know if I’ll do it every week, but I think I just may. One, I think they look cool and interesting. And, more importantly, two – they are great ways to keep me moving forward with my various projects.

Here’s the deal: there’s a very cool website called “Wordle“. You cut and paste text (or a text link) and it jumbles the words into a cloud that highlights the most commonly used words in your selected text. I’m drafting this post early so I can focus on writing all next week, so this first one will be the latest three things that I have been working on, but going forward I’m going to do a word cloud for each work in progress that I actually worked on in the week. This way, you can get a teaser AND I have incentive to work on multiple things so I can demonstrate that I actually DO work on my novel/short story collection when no one is watching…

Incidentally, one of the coolest bits of word clouds for me is trying to figure out what the excerpted text is actually about – it’s like finding pictures in the real clouds for me. So if you should happen to see anything in these words that inspires you or makes you spontaneously craft your own image of what I’m writing about, please share. I like hearing what other people see in the clouds! 🙂

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From “On His Shoulders” (short story)

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From “The Freebie” (short story whose title is likely to change)

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From the Novel in Progress (I don’t give this title out, sorry)