Wordl-y Distractions

From the Dept. of Distractions comes Wordle, an online word-cloud generator that's way too effective a distraction from writing.

Here's how it works, you plug in any text or the URL from a blog or from any site with an RSS feed et voilà: a word cloud that you can then manipulate in scores of time-wasting ways -- fonts, colors, orientation, language and layout.

Of the two pictured here, one was created from the prologue of my fantasy novel, The MoonQuest, and the second from the back-cover copy for my book about writing, The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write.

One tip: As far as I can tell, Wordle only lets you save your word creation to its gallery (offering an image link to post it elsewhere). But you can also use a screen-capture utility (for example, Grab on the Mac) to get your own, offline copy.

Yes, it's a distraction -- I spent much more time playing with Wordle than creating this post. But at least it's all about words!

(I first heard about Wordle on Twitter. If you're not already following me on Twitter, please do.)