Where's the "is" button?

Use the "be" button to get   is, are, am, was, were, being, and been.

Will there be a Mac version?

Sorry, there won't be.

I have a problem with an earlier version of Icon Poet.

Install the latest version. Don't uninstall first unless you want to lose your vocabulary changes.

It used to be when I clicked the "pronoun" button, it displayed a colorful screen full of pronouns and I could pick my own. I let my rotten little brother use my computer, and now it just puts a random pronoun on the screen. How do I change it back?

Go to the Edit menu, select Options, then the "Left-click" tab. Click the circle left of "displays pronoun screen." Besides pronouns, six other categories may be toggled this way.

Are the spellings English or U.S.?

The spellings are American, but it's very easy to edit the program's vocabulary. You can even change the interface's "pluralize" and "capitalize" buttons to the English "pluralise" and "capitalise."

Is it only for poetry? I'm more interested in writing short stories.

People tend to use Icon Poet for poetry, but it overcomes clichéd thinking in a way that is equally valuable for writers of prose.

We hope that sooner or later some mad genius writes an entire novel using Icon Poet. This could be a masterpiece of surrealist fiction!

How do I uninstall it?

Click on the Windows Start button, then "Programs," then "Icon Poet," then "Uninstall Icon Poet."

How did you ever come up with this idea?

The first primitive ancestor of Icon Poet actually dates back to 1988. I had created a Rimbaud-inspired poetry generator, A Season in RAM (link is a YouTube video), and was convinced that machines could produce flashes of poetic brilliance (along with volumes of leaden gibberish). Unfortunately, the computer can't tell the difference; it takes a human to recognize what works and what doesn't. One day the idea struck me to keep the randomness but introduce an element of interactivity, and Icon Poet was born.

That first version was pretty crude. There was no way to load, save, or edit. When text scrolled off the top of the screen, it was gone. I put it aside to work on other projects, and a number of years passed before I looked at it again. When I did, I was surprised at how entertaining I still found it.

Icon Poet has undergone several total re-writes since then. With the current Windows version, I think it's a fun toy that can also be a serious improvisational writing tool.

Got any other interesting free stuff?

There's a random talking head called Uncle Weevy on my web site, www.stevetiffany.com, that you might enjoy.