More Stats for the Stats God

Surprise, it's me again!

I was doing some thinking about the genres I typically write, and I realized something. My spreadsheet of story stats (which includes things like Point of View used, number of deaths, times "fuck" is used, etc.) does not include one seemingly obvious aspect: genre.

So I've set about correcting that, only to find it's harder than I thought. Is a ghost story paranormal, supernatural, or horror? What about a weird, unearthly carnival? Or a seemingly normal object that does a weird thing?

By the Numbers

I read an article once. This article. They were comparing things like exclamation points, first sentence length, and cliché usage between various authors.

So I decided to track some things in my own works. I tried for things that could be easily found with a simple Ctrl+F, for the sake of sanity. Things like clichés would require me to either search for every known cliché in each file, or actually read the whole damn thing and try to catch them. Too much effort on my part.

I took every NaNoWriMo novel, any Camp NaNos that reached some form of completion, and some short stories from the past few years. I'm not sure what I'm trying to prove with any of this, or if there's any useful information to be learned here, but damn it, I do love charts.