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See also:NaNoGenLab (2014)∘MARYSUE (2015)∘2017 Entries∘2018 Entries∘2019 Entries

The Swallows is a series of computer-generated novels meta-written forNaNoGenMo 2013 byCat's Eye Technologies. Our submission issue can be foundhere.

The Swallows is also the name of the first novel in the series.It follows the madcap adventures of Alice and Bob as they both tryto acquire the golden falcon, which is priceless, or at the very leastirrationally desirable by all involved.

The Swallows of Summer, the sequel toThe Swallows, revisitsAlice and Bob's life three years later. They have a much bigger housenow. They also own more things.

Swallows and Sorrows, the third book in the series, shows us anotherperiod in Alice and Bob's life, not much later. They have taken up drinking —at least when they are disturbed by things — to calm their nerves. And thenthey start arguing. Oh, and the narrator knows how to use pronouns now.

The fourth novel,Dial S for Swallows, probably takes place shortlythereafter, or possibly at the same time asSwallows and Sorrows but in analternate universe. Alice and Bob are no longer psychic (although this maynot have been apparent in the previous books, the fact is that they wereeasily able tell what the other was thinking. Now, they only have suspicions.Also, the previous editor was sacked, and a completely new editor installedin their place.)

All four novels can be found, in Markdown format, in thedoc subdirectoryof this distribution.

At 49K words (in 15 chapters of 33 paragraphs each,)The Swallows is notquite long enough to qualify for NaNoGenMo. At 53K words,The Swallows of Summer is.Swallows and Sorrows is just barely over50K words.Dial S for Swallows is over 56K words.

All novels were generated by the Python scriptthe_swallows.py in thescript directory, at different points in time. See the repositoryhistory to get the version of the script used for a particular novel.

I invite the reader who is interested in how the script works to read thesource code. It sometimes even contains comments.