My Novel is 0.1% Coffee, 0.1% Firebird Trans Am

This is the kind of thing you do at the end of the work week, when the brain is refusing to produce any more remotely creative content. You run a search to see how often certain words occur in your manuscript. (Don’t judge me.)

Here’s what I found:

• Once we get past the articles, prepositions, pronouns and some common verbs, the most commonly used word in the story is the name of the story’s protagonist’s friend and mentor, Weatherman – which is suitably representative of his importance in the protag’s life, considering that Weatherman himself is off-screen for large chunks of the story at a time. By comparison, the protagonist’s own name, Rain, is used half as often (to be fair, it’s a first-person POV story)
• Interestingly enough, the names of most recurring characters used in the story are very close together, frequency-wise, even though I tend to think of all of them not having that much screen time. Notably, Rain’s car, Firebird, gets as many mentions as anyone else, in the region of 140.
• There’s a chance that Rain smokes more than he’s willing to admit, seeing as word “cigarette” alone is used 66 times, and “smoke” another 45. To be fair, he’s not the only smoker in the story: I’m willing to bet that a good chunk of these can be attributed to his doppelganger.
• Coffee, though, is definitely the most important substance in the story, with the word used 128 times in a roughly 130,000 word manuscript. This is official: my book is 0.1% coffee.
• I’m going to finish on an uplifting note. Rain’s history and personality combined give light, fire, and darkness all important roles in his story, both symbolically and literally. Well, I’m happy to say that, no matter how dark the story can get sometimes, it’s literally not all doom and gloom: combined, the words “light” and “fire” are used more than twice as much as “dark” and “darkness”.