I will of course do what I can to finish out the month and all that, but I have now officially validated that I wrote 50,000 words in November. The National Novel Writing Month organization (NaNoWriMo.org) defines writing that many words as “winning.”
NaNoWriMo does its validation by asking you up upload the full text of your novel to their validator. (Sure hope they don’t keep it and publish it themselves!) However, I was adding words to an additional text, so — well, why write the same thing twice? Here the top of the file I submitted to the NaNoWriMo validator:
My NaMoWriMo “novel” for November 2016 was actually me working further on a book that already had 69,458 words in it. In order to create this “validation” version to submit to NaNoWriMo’s validator, I used LibreOffice’s Document Compare feature to find all the “new” words written between 1 Nov and 28 Nov (at which point my spreadsheet showed I had done 54,292 words). I took all the “new” words and copied them into this file. That resulted in a files with 56,512 words, a difference of 2,220 words. I did not bother with one-word or two-word changes, or places where I simply replaced one word with another, and I generally ignored nickel-and-dime changes.
Because I cut-and-pasted words from various chunks of the book, (because I did inserts in various places) what follows has somewhat incomprehensible passages that might read like certain spam emails. Because I have written this explanation, the explanation is also adding some words. I have no idea why lifting my “new” words from the comparison is showing 2,220 more words than my spreadsheet, and I don’t want to burn up time chasing this trivial detail. Therefore, I am just going to cut enough words from the end of this file to get the count as shown by LibreOffice down to 54,292, and then submit that to validate my work. I would expect that NaNoWriMo’s word count to be different from mine.
[The file I submitted to the NaNoWriMo validator consisted of the above text, plus just enough of the words I had written in November to get to 54,292. I copied those words and “pasted” them into NaMoWriMo’s validator.]
As it turns out, NaNoWriMo showed me at 53,240, and adjusted things by reporting that I wrote negative 1,052 words today, which would be a neat trick, but what the hell.
As it happens, and this might be in part psychological, the last 37,000 words or so of what I wrote in November was mostly a huge long new scene (which, as discussed elsewhere, I might well end up cutting by three-fourths — who knows). Maybe I was just writing “new” copy because that’s what the rules told me to do — though I doubt it. Even so, that insert did happen to end pretty neatly right after the 50,000 word mark.
In any event I am now back into the existing text of the book, and what I am doing is half writing and half editing on the screen. I am reading along and inserting and editing and tweaking as I go. I will endeavor (endeavour if you’re British) to keep cranking the words out, but they won’t be in one big chunk, but a paragraph here and a sentence there — and maybe not 2,000 words a day. As it stands now, we’re at 123,750, and the way things are going, I’ll be lucky to bring this thing in for a landing at anything under 200,000. And that’s just volume one. (Unless I slice Volume One into two volumes, and then… Oh, never mind. We’ll see how it goes.
Onward, I guess.
