Love Lessons

A few words about the images above. They’re wordles. A ‘wordle’ is a web tool that allows you to see how frequently words appear in a given text. You can tweak your word “clouds” with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. Do your own here. I’ve pasted in the 3000 words that make up the afterword to the new edition of my best known novel Love Lessons, which Five Leaves publish later this month. The result is above, giving you a flavour of the new afterword. The higher wordle (with the brown background) is what happens when you put in just the first page. Double click to see a bigger image and check out the differences between the two. I was going to publish an extract from the afterword on this blog, but the above seems a better way to go. While I’ve been writing this, my copies came and it’s a really handsome edition, on excellent paper. I’ll be talking about and reading from the book at Leicester Writers’ club next week (May 7, 7.30-9pm, The Small Hall, Leicester Adult Education College, Wellington St, free, no ticket required) along with two fine first novelists, Clare Tulloch (‘Drowned’) and Dan Tunstall (‘Big and Clever’). We’ll also be talking about writing for teens.