I found a website that takes chunks of text and makes these fascinating collages/word clouds out of them. I couldn't resist plugging in a very short short story I wrote at the Dusty Owl Play Date a while back and was particularly pleased with...
Doing this kind of thing can be a mindless exercise along the lines of flipping through photos of yourself in your Facebook gallery, or it can give you some ideas. In this case, I think the image I got gives me a strange disjointed look at the story's atmosphere. It's like an automated version of the exercise where you cut up the words of a text and reshuffle them: which I've tried, like meditating, without ever getting to something I'd call enlightenment. Maybe you just need to take more time doing it, or maybe I'm a slave to syntax. In any case, this little applet does remove any compulsion to make sense out of words and shows me a bit about how I went about building the story's feel.
And it looks cool.
