Asemic Novels

[jseakle]

Inspired in part by Casey Callich's wonderful post on Asemic Writing, I decided to produce a novel with no semantic content.

If I stay super dedicated, maybe I'll get as far as a procedurally generated font and some nice rendering tools so that I can get away from these horribly meaning-rich ASCII glyphs. But for now the goal is just to make a novel out of meaningless wordlike ASCII units.

It felt somehow appropriate, even important, to produce a full novel as the absolute first output of my program – no inspecting the outputs of components as I worked, no bugfixing, a pure attempt to envision the shape of the output of my code and then see what happened. From blank file to output was about 40 minutes.

This exercise went very well – I got about 90% of what I wanted, and the bugs that made it in gave the output a really quite incredible flavor that I never would've imagined on my own. I'm very pleased.

I will likely go ahead and fiddle with the numbers and shape it into something more closely resembling my original intention, but for now, here's Ogaeiouaeioujaeiou.

The code is available at https://github.com/jseakle/nanogenmo2018