Wandering Shop Reviews

[emmajuettner]

My basic idea for this year: An episodic story about one of those magical wandering shops that is never in the same place twice, but the story is told entirely through the shop's reviews.

This concept is partly inspired by Alexandra Erin's short story We're Always Looking Forward to Seeing You, a horror story about a hotel told via online reviews. I'm planning to go in a different direction, though, by making each review its own standalone episode in the wandering shop's history.

Last year I had a lot of fun incorporating phrases from Putnam's Phrase Book into my generative writing, and this year I'd like to do something similar. I'm planning to use the Weird Old Book Finder to find public domain books, from which I'll compile some lists of phrases to use in the reviews. I'm hoping that this will allow me to give the reviews a more interesting variety of voices to make it convincing that each one is being written by a different person. Also I just think it will be fun to juxtapose old-timey language and arcane subject matter with the format and tone of online business reviews.

So far I've just set up a skeleton repo with some code for generating an html page from tracery grammars, so that I can add to it iteratively. You can see the current state of the output at any given time here (there's not much to see yet).

[emmajuettner]

Time got away from me this month (doesn't it always) but I do have an entry that meets word count. It's a lot more repetitive and less coherent than I would have liked since I didn't get a chance to collect as much source material as I had planned. I might come back to the idea at some point though, since I still like the original concept.

Some of the better examples:

Link to full entry: https://emmajuettner.com/wandering-shop-reviews/

Code: https://github.com/emmajuettner/wandering-shop-reviews