I did something incredibly dumb today, and luckily for me it seems to have worked out:  further cementing my status as an Apple fanboy, I upgraded the system software on every computing device I own (excepting only my aging, decrepit Windows laptop) in the same evening:  my phone, my iPad, and my desktop all got shiny new upgrades tonight– granted, the two mobile devices were already on iOS 7, and so their upgrades were incremental, but I just did a day-of-release upgrade to OS X 10.9 Mavericks, and it hasn’t made the computer blow up yet.  Hooray for progress!

I recently became aware of a website called I Write Like, which purports to analyze your writing and tell you which famous author you write like.  I have my own theories about this, of course, which I won’t actually share because they make me seem like a wanker no matter who the author is, but I was curious about it.  The verdict:  Give me a god damn break.

I started by feeding it the “10 SF/Fantasy Works that meant the Most to Me” essay from last week, which by the way is currently the most popular post I’ve written here.   I didn’t really know what to think of that one; I wasn’t really trying to channel anyone in particular (even though I got the idea from Scalzi) and it was basically just an essay.  Not much would have surprised me.

It gave me…

Nah, wait for it.

A little longer.

H. P. fucking Lovecraft.

Which right there just eliminates any chance of this being anything real.  I initially suspected it actually chose Lovecraft out of a hat; I just did it again on a different computer and it gave me the same result, so it’s doing something other than just picking, but I’ll be damned if I have any idea what.  Not that I mind being compared to Lovecraft, as I love his work, but… no.  Come the fuck on.

So then I decided to put in some fiction, and gave it the first few paragraphs of my novel Skylights.  Which is a science fiction novel, set on Mars.  And is therefore not very Lovecraftian.

It gave me Chuck Palahniuk, which… well, I don’t read Palahniuk, actually, but my based-on-nothing impression of his writing style does not cause me to immediately reject this suggestion.

Then I remembered a piece I did a couple of years ago where I was deliberately aping H.P. Lovecraft.  And, to my mind, at least, I did a pretty decent job of it.  So I fed that in.

Dan fucking Brown.

But!

The other piece I did a couple of years ago where I was trying to imitate someone’s style– this time Salman Rushdie– also gave me H.P. Lovecraft.

(This blog post?  Also Lovecraft.)

I think this thing only actually has four authors in it.

---

EDIT:  at MLW’s suggestion, I fed a bit of a Palahniuk short story and the first few paragraphs of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness into the thing.  It got them both right.