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I've just amused myself by running what I've done of my

watchersdiaries ficathon story through The Gender Genie (gacked from

agilebrit this time around, although I had seen it before): the result was
Female Score: 5197
Male Score: 3824
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

It's written from a female POV (Slayer!) so I suppose that's a good sign. Right?

I'm rather regretting having offered two stories for the ficathon. This one is going really well, but I'm not sure about the other. I've decided to make it a lot shorter than "The Cloak of Mist" is going to be, as otherwise I'm going to be tied up on this for far too long, and I'm not sure if anything will come of the project to co-write a story with

ezagaaikwe. Turning my vision into something coherent that I can pass on to her is proving to be remarkably hard.

My posting date for the

watchersdiaries is to be February 11th. I plan to be finished with them well before then and get back to the WIPs. However, I fall into the category "mice and men" so my plans gang oft agley. We'll just have to see how it goes. There will be a new chapter of "Life in Shadow" on February 19th whatever happens.

Well, not whatever happens. There are many things that could prevent it; asteroid impacts, nuclear wars, terminal computer failure, supervolcanic eruptions; but I won't let common or garden distractions stop me.

There was a point to this when I started but I can't remember what it was. Oh, yes. Thanks to

megan_peta,

evilawyer, and

zanthinegirl for your valuable assistance. Your thoughts have been a big help to me.

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Oh, hee, the gender genie.

I played with it a bit a year or so ago, and found it consistently scored my academic writing as male and my creative writing as female. I have a feeling this tells us more about the Genie than about my writing.

Probably. I might have been a little worried if it had scored a female POV score as strongly masculine, I suppose, but I doubt if it would be terribly relevant to a fic about a Slayer in the Viking Age even if it was totally reliable for works with a contemporary setting.

I don't think setting matters particularly. Did you look at the paper the Genie is based on?

Yes, including the 'men talk more about things and women talk more about relationships' bit. Setting does have a bearing on that, e.g.

"Olaf, burn the church. Sven, load the gold plate into the longship. Tostig, slaughter the monks. I shall ravish this attractive Saxon wench."

"Wait, oh Viking chieftain. First, let's talk about our relationship."

But you'd get the same thing in a contemporary action-adventure sequence, right?

You could get a paraphrase of that conversation in a modern action-adventure comedy (something along the lines of "Romancing the Stone", for instance) and it wouldn't be total parody as it would in a historical setting.

However my main point is that genre will affect word usage more than gender.

Genre, yes, for sure. Which gets back to my original observation about academic vs creative writing, I think.

Seriously, the Gender Genie just bugs me. And also amuses me, because everyone I know who's run their writing through it has managed to trick it. Which really makes me wonder about the legitimacy of the original research...though to be fair, they say the online version is a simplified algorithm.