I'm in

[ashanan]

Current idea: chapters are titled with word/book pairs. Each chapter is every sentence in that book that contains that word. Think "White in Moby Dick."

[ashanan]

And here's the repo: https://github.com/ashanan/NaNoGenMo-2014Entry/tree/master

[dariusk]

Looking forward to this!

[hugovk]

Yes, sounds good!

Of course, it depends a lot on the word and the book. "White in Moby Dick" sounds good.

The OED has a word of the day, and the quotations for "moonlit" were particularly poetic:

Along the moon-lit shore,—a dreary waste,—no peaceful Indian watch'd her rising orb.
Night silent comes;..Tilt half enchains wi' rugged hand His moon-lit wave.
The City's moon-lit spires and myriad lamps.
The sloping of the moonlit sward.
She stood on deck, watching the moonlit sea.
He was crazy in love with her and one moonlit night he proposed to her.
The sky was clear and moonlit and cold.
She stood looking out at the shadowed grey-white moonlit world.
Below her the wall dropped dizzyingly down,..and beyond that the moonlit roofs of the outer city reached away.

See also Darius's Occurrences of 'Love' in Last Words of Executed Texas Death Row Inmates.

[ashanan]

@dariusk thanks!

@hugovk thanks! I think it will be interesting to use the same set of words in different books. It didn't even occur to me to use non-book texts, that's a really neat idea.

Here's my first generated novel, clocking in at 57309 words.
https://gist.github.com/ashanan/e936983a8e4e4808df34

[hugovk]

Good stuff!

It'd be great to print out full sentences rather that individual lines arbitrary start and end cut-offs.

You could maybe parse using NLTK, or if that's a bit heavy, just scan backwards to the preceding . and forward to the following . might give good results. (Or rather: ., ? or !, with some special handling for to retain quotes: "Why sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?").

And perhaps just look for the whole word, case-insensitive: for "night" there's some "nights" and "midnight", which are fine, but quite a few "knight".

You could try also "Monomaniac in Moby Dick". Perhaps "<Protagonist_name> in book" might give a cut-down version of a whole story.

[ashanan]

I have some thoughts about how to do better parsing. That and case sensitivity are both issues already. Please feel free to add new ones (or comment here) if you think any more improvements.

https://github.com/ashanan/NaNoGenMo-2014Entry/issues