Thursday, November 09, 2006

The Evil Word Count

Well, now I've really got things screwed up. NaNo kindly provides a method by which you can upload your manuscript for a kinda stamp-of-approval word count. I wasn't gonna bother with it, but I've been so curious about that widget thingy in my sidebar.

Meanwhile, I've been teetering back and forth between which method to use: computer word count, or the 25 lines per page = 250 words deal.

Trust me, sometimes there's a huge difference. From what I understand, the variation has something to do with whitespace. So if, for example, you have lots of dialogue on a page, the actual (physical) word count is gonna be less when calculated by the computer. Conversely, a page heavy with narrative may turn out to be more.

Whatever. Something like that.

Right now, if I go by 25 lines per page = 250, I've racked up almost 15,000 words. Sadly, if I make Microsoft count, it turns into more like 12,000. Eeek. Quel difference.

So, like I said, I uploaded a .txt version of the file to NaNo for official ruling and it came back with the figure you see in the widget thingy.

Which is why, since the last time you visited, I may have gone backward (sob).

I still can't explain why it seems to think I'm ahead of the game.

'Cuz I'm definitely not.

1 comment:

John said...

You are doing it, which puts you ahead of lots of games. Good going.