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.

I started with exclamation points.
 

Then length of the first sentence.
 

Okay, a lot of variety, but what does that tell us about these stories, or the nut who wrote them? Not a lot. So I added some more metrics. Better ones. Messy ones.

First, bloodiness. That is, how many times the word "blood" or its various noun, verb, and adjective forms appears in the work.
 

Now we're getting somewhere interesting. The highest ranking, with a grand total of 146 occurrences, is Cold Blooded, last year's vampire story. That's to be expected. The second highest only has 2 actual occurrences, but since it was just under 1,000 words total, it skews the data. I had a whole debate on whether I should include it, and went with "Why not?" It's my chart, I do what I want. But overall, there is a lot of blood in my stories. I'm a violent person, literarily speaking. But we knew that.

My most recent, and probably favorite addition is what I have lovingly dubbed "Fucks Given."
 

Here, as you can see, I tracked 3 different words starting with 2010's NaNo novel, all the way through 2017's. The early years were much milder in the profanity department. Then it was like I suddenly realized that I could say what I wanted, that I didn't have to censor it for anyone in particular, since no one was likely to read it anyway. This year's was kind of off the charts, and that's not even including the various notes to myself in there. The Long Road in fact contains 74 instances of "fuck," more than anything else, more than any of my 50,000 word novels, even though it's only about 25,600 words long.

Some might say that shows a lack of intelligence. That profanity is used in place of a more well-rounded vocabulary. I say, "Shit, man, that's just how people talk."

The next thing I'd like to track is deaths, but my god, is that going to be hard. Time-consuming, at any rate. No quick search for that one. And I'd have to ask myself what count as deaths. On-the-page murder, for sure. But what about the unknown number of people who die right before the story starts in "My Soul to Take"? Or how, in Murder on Ruby Rock, the fate of one character remains unknown, as in, I don't know if they live or die? I guess I'd start with concrete, discrete and countable deaths. I wonder if the body count is as high as I think it is.

Stay tuned, when we learn if I'm a literary mass murderer.

I'll see you Friday.