Today's Pleasant Surprise

[beccastareyes]

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.

Comments

[yuuo.insanejournal.com]

Glad to hear it's going so well.

I tried writing 1000 words a day for awhile, just... to make myself write. (This was some time back- like... about this time last year?) And it was working well, for awhile- it's okay to even take a day off if you were sick, but I fell out of that and had nothing to help get me back in. :/

Maybe we could make that a habit after December- I'm gonna keep working on NaNo clear past December, because if I can hit that 50K mark, I want to claim that free print copy of my story, and 50K is not going to actually finish my story. XD;

But after the holiday obligations and stresses, maybe that'd be a good thing for us to get into doing.

Good luck with finishing NaNo! ♥ I'll see you at the finish line- you'll probably beat me there, though. :Db

[beccastareyes.insanejournal.com]

Thanks for the confidence.

Or even... if I spend the evening drawing or something, I don't mind not writing. But I do want to be doing something in the evenings, just as a 'yeah, I got stuff done today'.

[yuuo.insanejournal.com]

A noble goal! I wish I could make myself do that. XD;