Writing tics

During my daily browse through the blogs I follow, I ran across Nathan Bradsford's post about his writing tics. I know the things that I think are my tics from editing, but one of the commenters gave a link to a site that will generate a word cloud for your writing.  Curious to see a visual representation of my word choice, I went to the site and entered the text of Shatter. I can't say I'm surprised, except for one thing - the characters. The cloud shows pretty conclusively who the three main characters of the book are.  Two are obvious, but I didn't expect one.  Though when you look at the story, it really shouldn't have shocked me.  Here are the results:

(Click on the pictures if you'd like to see larger versions.)

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So, my three main characters according to these clouds are Faela, Kade, and Sheridan. I never intended for Sheridan to wiggle her way into that status, but as the story morphed and molded it just happened and I think the story is much better for it.  Now, what I find really fascinating is that if you compare my word cloud for Shatter with my short story "The River," you can see my underlying voice come out in my diction. Despite the fact that one work is just under 8k words and one is just under 150k, my word choice stays remarkably consistent.

What can I say? "Back" is a work horse of a word, pulling parts of speech double duty and I like eyes and hands.