Have you read the latest hot take think piece on romance novels? Romance Twitter was all atwitter about it yesterday. I only skimmed over it briefly because, as Cat Sebastian pointed out, we’ve all read it before.
I've effectively read every single paragraph in that essay five times before.
— Cat Sebastian (@CatSWrites) August 18, 2019
This particular piece included the realization that contemporary romance was “suddenly, shockingly, pretty good.” High praise indeed for a billion dollar industry. Anyway, who cares what that piece actually said? Would you like to do a mad lib and write your own romance hot take? Of course you would, and I found a way to make one. There wasn’t a WP plugin, but I found an embeddable Python script I could modify.
As an added bonus, I surprised my taller half who never expected to see Python on my laptop screen. He also pointed out that there are, in fact, publicly available news generation algorithms that will create very readable but equally nonsensical thinkpieces, far more quickly than I can figure out Python. You provide a headline, in lieu of six different adjectives. Here’s a few I got out of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence’s GROVER algorithm, each generated from a headline I wrote and in the style of a website I chose.
Bodice rippers for the new millenium
The New Yorker — A writer’s journey has actually always been written on a one-page page — every day. Researching the background behind a title, character, setting or story idea is a writing activity that keeps thousands of teachers and students closer together. But, it also rips away our imaginary identity and make us the author. How many rants could ever fit on your social media feed?
One man’s trashy romance novel is another woman’s treasured story
New York Times — “I’m the narrator. Sort of,” Allyson says. “It’s not that surprising that I’m the narrator because I’m the main character, and I write about love and sex and romantic relationships. But what I actually write about is poop.
“Well, not poop exactly, but nature in general,” she adds. “My characters end up dating a dumpster.”
The hottest robot romances to read this summer
USA Today — Stacey Potter, a 31-year-old Stanford graduate who got a job at a robotics company in Detroit and moved into her own place with a robot, wants to find the robot she wants to spend the rest of her life with.
“Isolation is hard to do when you’re high-flying and have control,” she said. “You don’t get to date robots.”
It’s love at first high-speed head-to-head rivalry. Who wins?
