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Well, these are not generators for electricity, these are “Random Generators”, for poetry, for haiku, for words, sentences, whatever.

I tinker around with these when I need a break, and today I found a really interesting one, a bestseller generator.

I fed in my inputs in the form, and this is what I got:

CHAPTER ONE

After a while the torch beams of the other searchers turned into distant flashes of light and the voices became an occasional call carried on the wind and not definitely identifiable as animal, let alone human. Inspector Wicks looked up from the boggy ground in front of his feet as the moon came out from behind a black scurrying cloud.
“Goodness gracious!” His boot slipped sideways pitching him forwards. Not only did he now have wet knees and a wet sock but he had managed to hit the only rock between here and Sheffield and he struggled to his feet ruefully rubbing his sore hand. He was dog-tired. What a night, what a really horrendous night, one which had actually started well, on his settee with a takeaway and a can of lager in front of the TV and should have ended a couple of hours later in bed with a large tot of his favourite single malt on the bedside table. Instead here he was tramping a particularly inhospitable part of the moor, looking for a lost kid called Anne whose most recent school photo had covered the front pages of all the papers for the last two days. He groaned; damn this job; damn Crimewatch; damn the busybody public with their farfetched anonymous tip-offs. If only he was in bed, if only he was at the gate, if only he was anywhere else.

Another thick curtain of cloud was drawn across the leering face of the moon, accompanied by a high-pitched whistle. Was that the signal? Had something been found? He struggled to avoid imagining what that something might be, instead his mind produced a sudden image of the huge elephant that had stalked his night hours in childhood, he squashed that thought too, a childish terror but not one to conjure up in the present circumstances. He deliberately formed an image of his own small son fast asleep in that terraced house in South London, under the blue dolphin duvet cover that ÖÖ blue, something had been blue. He swung back the torch beam, retracing the path it had taken, a childís blue shirt. Probably been there for weeks, blown away on a summer picnic. It looked new. Reluctantly but methodically he directed his torch over a 6 metre circle surrounding the blue shirt. This time white, the white curve of a small bent leg, a tangle of arms, neck twisted sideways, life-sized but not life-like, surely an abandoned doll, let fall and forgotten at the day’s end: and beside the doll, incongruously, partially obscuring its face, an all too real-looking Hairpin.

Try feeding in your own words, and see what you get. I got a go ahead for 29 more chapters, lols.

Damyanti Biswas

Damyanti Biswas’s short fiction has been published at Smokelong, Ambit, Litro, Puerto del Sol, among others, and she's the co-editor of The Forge literary magazine. She's the author of YOU BENEATH YOUR SKIN, a bestselling crime novel, which has been optioned for screens by Endemol Shine. Her next #1 Amazon bestselling crime novel, THE BLUE BAR, was published by Thomas & Mercer. It received a starred review on Publishers Weekly, and was one of 2023's Most Anticipated Mysteries & Thrillers on Goodreads. Kirkus Reviews called its sequel, THE BLUE MONSOON, a compelling procedural awash in crosscurrents.

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