{"id":58,"date":"2008-07-10T12:07:48","date_gmt":"2008-07-10T16:07:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=58"},"modified":"2008-07-10T12:46:10","modified_gmt":"2008-07-10T16:46:10","slug":"whats-your-book-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2008\/07\/whats-your-book-about\/","title":{"rendered":"“What’s Your Book About?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I hate that question. (I hate a lot of questions, grump that I am.) There’s no easy way to answer it, really — not just me, for Merry-Go-Round<\/em>, but a lot of other writers, for their books. After you’ve spent months or years ensuring that it would be about something<\/em>, when somebody asks the question as an icebreaker at a cocktail party it’s hard to say much more than, “Uhhhhhh…”<\/p>\n

(Oh, I generally manage to improvise something. A good shortcut is to say something like, “You know [insert book or movie title here]? Well, my book is like that, except [insert exception(s) here].” At the very least, this simplifies the task of changing the subject — because now you’ll be talking about somebody else’s book or movie instead of your own.<\/p>\n

But now along comes Wordle<\/a>. And I think it provides an easy way to answer the question: paste the entire contents of your book into the Wordle form, and hit the Go button. Instant summary. And it’ll keep the questioner busy for hours.<\/p>\n

I don’t have the entire Merry-Go-Round<\/em> manuscript handy. But I do have an early draft of Chapters 8 through 19 here. If you’d read that excerpt when it was current, the following would have made sense (click for larger image; note that the Wordle settings I chose here specified that it would display no more than 1000 words — the default is much smaller, 150 or so):<\/p>\n

\"Wordle<\/a><\/p>\n

Voil\u00e1<\/em> — instant synopsis! (Now if I could only convince an agent to accept this sort of thing instead of a real synopsis…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I hate that question. (I hate a lot of questions, grump that I am.) There’s no easy way to answer it, really — not just me, for Merry-Go-Round, but a lot of other writers, for their books. After you’ve spent months or years ensuring that it would be about something, when somebody asks the question […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19,5,6],"tags":[79,202,203],"class_list":{"0":"post-58","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-internet","7":"category-06_writing","8":"category-merrygoround","9":"tag-merry-go-round","10":"tag-wordle","11":"tag-synopsis","12":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-W","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}