Tuesday, November 29, 2005

NaNo - Day 29

I know that if you look at the graph above it looks like I wrote like a mofo today, but that's not the truth. It would seem that I won the NaNoWriMo Word Count Validator Lottery! Here's a posting I made in the forum that describes what happened:

I have had quite a lot to celebrate tonight! First off, I finally won NaNoWriMo for the first time, this being the fourth year I've participated. Yay me for coming back from 'failing' for three years and doing what I didn't think was possible!

Then, when I finished writing tonight, WordPerfect 9 told me I had 50133 words. Yay! I was finished! Part of me had been hoping for 51000 words or 53000 words, but I decided to be happy with the word count I had. Eager to prove my win, I converted it to text and uploaded it into the word count validator. I just took it for granted that the validator would tell me I had the 50133 words or so that I figured there was! It was so exciting afterwards to see Winner! written on the page after it accepted my document.

I spent a minute or so looking over the winners info page, then opened a new window to see if I could find the information again. I wanted to be able to get everything another time. Instead of clicking on 'edit profile' I accidentally clicked 'view profile.' I said yay as I looked at the little 2005 winner banner around my picture. Then I noticed that my blue line was way above the 50k line. I thought it was weird. Why would they put it way over? Then my eye caught the number it said for my word count - 62874!!! That's an extra 12741 words that the validator added to my word count! A full week's writing! I don't know if it was all the French I had thrown into my novel or what, but wow! What a fabulous surprise!!!

Yay! I finished! And a day early even! And if you'd like to see my NaNoWriMo profile you can check it out here. Tomorrow I'll show off the goodies I get for winning.

Word Count Goal: 48343
Actual Word Count: 62874 or 50133

2 comments:

LJE said...

woo hoo!!!!!!!!!!! when will it be ready for the average non-writer blokes like me to read?

LJE said...

ps - sometimes, different programs count words differently - some count actual words, separated by a space, and some count the number of characters, and then divide by 5 or 6, which is the average length of a word. So maybe that program did the latter, and if you had lots of long words (which I can see you doing), they may have counted as more in the end...