Final-ish because I am sure I’ll write more about writing and toss in a few words on NaNoWriMo at some point. Anyway, according to the LibreOffice word counter, and my spreadsheet on which I sliced and diced the numbers, as of 11:55 pm EDT on 30 November 2016, I had the following:
2,116 words written on 30 November.
58,490 words written in the month of November.
127,948 total words in the manuscript.
That works out to just over 45% of the length of the book written in one month. So why the hell did it take me years to write the other 69,458 words?
On November 28, when I “validated” my text (see prev. post) my spreadsheet, working from the LibreOffice word counter, said I had done 54,292 words. NaNoWriMo’s word counter clocked the same file at 53,240 words, or 0.9806 (just a teeny hair over 98%) of the value I got. Multiplying my final count of 58,490 by .0.9806, I got a NaNoWriMo-corrected value of 57,356.6565976571 words. I hope the world forgives me for claiming just over an extra third of a word, and claiming a NaNoWriMo-corrected value of 57,357 words, as that is the number I reported just before midnight of 30 November, the end of NaNoWriMo.
As you might gather, fiddling with the spreadsheets and the numbers was a big part of keeping myself on track, and giving myself a way to burn off nervous energy as I wrote.
ANYway, enough about numbers for now. As I plan to discuss in a later post, there is more to writing a book than getting numbers up on the board. I want to keep the momentum of writing up (if not at quite as hysterical a pace) but I also need to do a bit of stock-taking.
But first, I’m going to take a nap.
All best,
