| SANDMAN
REVIEWS
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A gripping psychological read with characters
that reach out and grab you. A real page turner.
SOPHIE KING
bestselling author of The Wedding Party
and other novels |
Sandman
touches our primary emotions: jealousy, love, fear, hatred,
and grief... Kingsley has written an intriguing mystery/psychological
thriller with interesting, believable and well-developed characters.
There are twists, turns, red herrings, and a healthy dose
of hair-raising fear and suspense to keep even the most fickle
reader captivated. The dialogue is authentic, and, along with
the scene-painting narrative, you’ll feel like you’re
on the beach witnessing the unfolding action.
 Highly
recommended to readers who enjoy a great mystery!
WILLIAM POTTER
Reader’s Choice Book Reviews
(5 Star Rating) |
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Word analysis—using 'word clouds'
All authors need to beware of over using particular
words. There are a few online ways that allow you to check this out, but
the cheapest and quickest I know is from wordle.net.
This is a fantastic and fun way to almost instantly find this out for
a block of text. I was surprised it actually worked with the full text
of my book, Sandman, and I have
copied the results in the diagram below.
The size
of the words in the word cloud is proportional to the usage of the word.
Above you see the name of my protagonist, 'Paul', his daughter 'Leah',
his wife 'Sasha', and the antagonist, 'Stevie', are the largest: which
is as it should be. Then there is 'Carol', another principal character,
and 'police', obviously used a lot in a thriller. Similarly 'Dad', Leah's
form of address for, Paul is large. As for the rest, no ordinary words
glaringly stand out, which is a source of some relief, otherwise I had
probably over-used them.
You
can change the preferences involving orientation, colour, etc, as the
following shows:
'That'
is generally one of the most over-used words. Given [that] it can usually
be deleted, and this was certainly my most over-used word, I now try hard
to avoid it. It does not leap out at me in the cloud, thankfully. In fact,
I'm not even sure it's there. Or am I wrong?
The
most amazing feature about this process is how fast it is. An entire book
is analysed in seconds. What an amazing tool for writers! Try it out yourself.
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