A text in which each word has one letter less than the preceding one, and the last word only one letter. From your newspaper, select a starting word, and then continue adding words of decreasing length from the same source article or passage. Challenge yourself further by only using words in order as you encounter them in the text.

 

I was sufficiently challenged by just finding the words that led down to a single character, and took liberties with that, as my choices were a or I, and neither worked well, so I resorted to numbers, and in at least one case stole it from a longer one.

 

Once I had my source text, I removed all extraneous characters and spaces so I could run it through a tool that sorted by word length. It was getting confused by the commas and quotation marks.  I then reviewed the list and calculated the letter counts for each group.

 

Here are my resulting snowballs, three of them, each beginning with a 13-letter word:

 

I.
DEEP WATER

 

Extraordinary
encapsulated
Geological
resources
evidence
diamond
locked
Earth
deep
520
to
0.

 

 

 

II.
Jellyfish Float

 

Invertebrates,
accidentally
translucent.
Gelatinous
creature,
floating
jellies.
Dragon
under
seas:
one
or
2.

 

III.

Diving Into the Veins

 

Decompressing
environments
inner-Earth
underwater
limestone
fissures
beneath
Mother
Earth
dive
for
20
7

 

CAS, April 28, 2014

 

 Spears, Tom, Finding Earth’s huge water reservoir, Ottawa Citizen print edition, April 28, 2014 (B3)

 

Spears, Tom, Swimming “through the veins of Mother Earth”, Ottawa Citizen print edition, April 28, 2014 (B3)

 

 Neergaard, Lauran, Unique floating lab showcases ‘aliens of the sea’, Ottawa Citizen, April 28, 2014 (A6)

 

Related articles

 

• Quillfyre’s #oulipost 10 Snowball
• Oulipost #10: Snowball