A handy comparison

Might as well just slit my wrists.

Science Fiction author, historian, and statistician Michael Flynn linked a website that will tell you who you write like. I decided to test it out.

For the test, I used the first scene from Father Max, because it is some of my latest work and I figure it is the most representative sample.

I write like
Dan Brown

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Sucks to be me.

And there goes my aspirations of ever being a writer, going down in flames before ever getting off the ground.

Ok, let's try the first scene of Jack Flint: Space Pirate. It is rubbish and desperately needs revision, but, come on, it's hard to get worse than Dan Brown.

I write like
Robert Louis Stevenson

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I'll take that. Probably because of all the pirate slang.

Hm. We need a tie-breaker. How about the first scene from my unfinished Star Trek fanfic?

I write like
Dan Brown

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

But he's not just any talentless hack. He's a best-selling millionaire talentless hack, proving once again that it's better to be rich than to be good.

Well, it's pretty definitive. I might as well just slit my wrists. No point in ever writing another

I Suspect...

...the purple car, in the living room, with the cardboard tube.

From Damien

Alternate caption: "The babby died. Oh well. Time to make a new one."

From the Department for Studying the Obvious

(Well, obvious to me, at least.)

News flash: chaste relationships have more romance.

You may now pick your jaw up off the floor. I know, shocking news.

Next week, we reveal a new in-depth study that shows men and women are different.

Key quotes:
"I think if you go to bed with somebody, it is a kind of bond; it's not nothing, however much we try to say it's nothing. Whether you're a man or woman, you're absolutely in your rights to expect there to be some kind of emotional gain."

"So yeah, I think it's difficult for teenage boys. And they're just bombarded with these images of female raunch wherever they look. I did speak to some male therapists who specialized in male patients. And I asked them what kind of changes they'd seen and they said a lot of their patients were getting younger, and they were coming to them with sexual problems that usually don't present until men are in their 50s. And this one guy said it was purely the result of internet porn, and they were just seeing too much and it was always on tap. Which is kind of awful, they had this kind of porn idea of what sex should be."

"And I'm actually quite happy, actually quite content. There's been a lot less sex, but more romance. And a lot more emotional closeness."

(OMG, an entire year without sex? That must have been so hard. Here, let me play the worlds smallest violin for you, while standing on the bank of Eastern Europe's saddest body of water, the Crimea River. It's filled with kitten tears.)

It was a dark and stormy night....

The results of the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have been announced! Here is a sample (runner-up, detective category):

As Holmes, who had a nose for danger, quietly fingered the bloody knife and eyed the various body parts strewn along the dark, deserted highway, he placed his ear to the ground and, with his heart in his throat, silently mouthed to his companion, "Arm yourself, Watson, there is an evil hand afoot ahead."

-- Dennis Pearce