Today's Pleasant Surprise

The NaNo auto word-counter (the one that validates that you indeed wrote 50,000 words and links you to the winner page where you get a button and a printable certificate) is more generous about words than my writing program. Not by much -- a difference of maybe 200 words in a 30,000 word passage -- but enough that it boosted my mood. Browsing on the forum shows that Word and OpenOffice users are having the opposite problem -- special characters like em-dashes and curly quotes apparently mess up their ability to count words, so they give more words than the NaNo site.

I also made my 30K, which means I'm only a day down. I could either do a hard day's writing tonight again, or just make sure I'm setting my daily goal to 2,000 instead of 1,700.

Plus, I'm getting a free lunch out -- the speaker today is taking us to the Mediterranean restaurant instead of letting the department buy us all pizza.

I am learning that I'm less happy with my original fiction than my fanfiction when NaNoveling. As is, I think I'm going to be just writing the first half of a novel -- I'll get to a solution, but really it's not all of the story, and I'll have to keep going, and weave some of my threads back in. I might try the 90-day novel community on Insanejournal (except it's dead) instead for original fiction in the future, and stick to using NaNo as an excuse to write longer fanfiction work, where 50,000 words gets me a lot more. (The 90-day novel is 750 words a day for 90 days. Even then, this might run short -- the writing every day thing does work for me, and keeps me from spending most of my evenings goofing off on the interwebs).

But, after this I have a fanfiction to write for Yuletide, and probably other obligations that I've forgotten about.

Today's Pleasant Surprise

The NaNo auto word-counter (the one that validates that you indeed wrote 50,000 words and links you to the winner page where you get a button and a printable certificate) is more generous about words than my writing program. Not by much -- a difference of maybe 200 words in a 30,000 word passage -- but enough that it boosted my mood. Browsing on the forum shows that Word and OpenOffice users are having the opposite problem -- special characters like em-dashes and curly quotes apparently mess up their ability to count words, so they give more words than the NaNo site.

I also made my 30K, which means I'm only a day down. I could either do a hard day's writing tonight again, or just make sure I'm setting my daily goal to 2,000 instead of 1,700.

Plus, I'm getting a free lunch out -- the speaker today is taking us to the Mediterranean restaurant instead of letting the department buy us all pizza.

I am learning that I'm less happy with my original fiction than my fanfiction when NaNoveling. As is, I think I'm going to be just writing the first half of a novel -- I'll get to a solution, but really it's not all of the story, and I'll have to keep going, and weave some of my threads back in. I might try the 90-day novel community on Insanejournal (except it's dead) instead for original fiction in the future, and stick to using NaNo as an excuse to write longer fanfiction work, where 50,000 words gets me a lot more. (The 90-day novel is 750 words a day for 90 days. Even then, this might run short -- the writing every day thing does work for me, and keeps me from spending most of my evenings goofing off on the interwebs).

But, after this I have a fanfiction to write for Yuletide, and probably other obligations that I've forgotten about.