SNAPE: THE DEFINITIVE ANALYSIS is now available as an audiobook narrated by Michelle H. Lee, as well as in hardcover. It’s a revised, expanded version of a study on Snape I wrote in 2016, now including a chapter on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and other content reflecting changes in the HP fandom since 2016.
Thank you to the Art Life podcast for inviting me on to discuss the art of editing, including practices from fanfic and beta reading that can benefit traditional fiction editing. Listen to the episode or read the transcript.
Coming October 18, 2022: an updated, expanded analysis of Professor Snape, one of the all-time great fictional characters of English literature. This volume includes an all-new chapter on the posthumous Snape of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. You can preorder the hardcover; ebook and audiobook versions are also in the works.
Extra thanks to the brilliant Mira T. Lee, author of Everything Here Is Beautiful, for redesigning my author website including a search function for blog posts.
Fundraiser time. Are you headed #BackToHogwarts, but uncertain about how welcoming it will be? These Hogwarts House octopods have something to say about that! All proceeds ($10 apiece) will go to the Trevor Project, and if you want, we can add a bit of ribbon or a sticker with @foxestacado‘s graphic to go with your House pod. Not making any money here, just fed up with the author’s anti-trans bigotry and feeling protective of people’s connection to the stories and the fandom.
If you’re a Potter fan who supports trans rights and rejects JKR’s bigotry, you are welcome to use this public domain graphic that @foxestacado created as a gift to the HP fandom.
This is fascinating, and from what I remember pretty accurate (although the opening, which is primarily green, is so evenly split it should be some kind of chequer-board). What’s mostly interesting is how little there is that’s pure red or pure green, which is how I remember it. Christmas, as they say in New Mexico, in answer to the State Question. It’s also why we were so unimpressed by anyone who thought they could tell us who wrote what, because when they cited things, they were mostly wrong.
Using a training set of texts by Pratchett and Gaiman, I used the R package Stylo to analyze Good Omens. (Specifically rolling nsc classification with 50 features and 5000 words per slice). The figure below shows my results. The words of the novel progress along the x axis. The pattern below the horizontal white line represents the signal from the author to whom the program attributed the majority of the authorship (Gaiman is in red and Pratchett is in green). The top, fainter pattern roughly shows how much signal there is from the other author. Together they add up to 100% in each section of the text.
I was amused to see a tiny sprinkling of me in Moving Pictures. Because there was a sprinkling of me in there. Terry would send me the book as he was writing it, and call to bounce ideas off me, and I’d cheerfully suggest lines and ideas. (There’s a sprinkling of me in Guards! Guards! and Moving Pictures, with a lot of me in Pyramids and Eric.)
