Congrats, liberty3701! That’s awesome, and that’s the whole point of the exercise, basically to just see if you can do it.
I’m happy to say I won too, yay! As I mentioned above I had to supplement my novel with about 4K extra new material for my serial, but writing is writing. So happy! And my publisher will be completely astonished to find that I’ve got a new book for him.
I haven’t finished typing up everything I wrote over the holiday - the comic was not inspiring me yesterday so I wrote 30 pages for another story, and then a little on the car ride home. I think I’m pretty close to on track, but I’m going to see if I can get it typed up tonight.
Congratulations to all of you!
I am now at 48k and change, so hopefully I can verify tomorrow evening. Yay me!
And then I can delete the awful mess. Double yay!
I’m not quite 5,000 words in. That’s not a typo. I’m not entirely sure I’m even interested in what happens to these people.
But I’m going to try to pull it out, since I’m unemployed anyway. Maybe in another 5,000 words I’ll start to take an interest. If I don’t, or if I finish by then, I’m going to start planning the next project on Thursday: I’ve found I’ve been underplanning Nano, but I think I now understand how to plan adequately, and I’m going to do a practice run, 75,000 words in February and March.
I’ve got just under 2,500 words to go. Poor Abbey is having a rough weekend. First a death procession almost lures her away during the wild hunt, and then she’s awoken by a kiss…but it’s not the guy she likes.
Just finished typing everything up. I wrote about 10k words in one day. I’m at 43,671. It’d be a terrible shame if I didn’t finish.
Just validated!
My word count went from50,506 in Scrivener to 50,053 in RoughDraft to 50,146 per the official NaNo validator.
Which is okay, at least it passed 50,000, but I thought I’d mention the variability in case anyone waits until close to midnight Wednesday to validate…
Best check early to see how your WP’s count compares with the Nano one. You might need to build in a few hundred extra words as a safety margin.
I’m about 13,000 short with 2 days to go. But I’m determined to make a big heave. I have a couple more chapters left before the big ending kicks in. Once I get to that I reckon I’ll be motoring.
OpenOffice’s count is higher than the Nano (apparently its mostly the smart quotes. I turned them off, but I wasn’t using a lot). Word’s seems to be a little lower.
Thanks, choie! And congrats to those who need them, and productive thoughts to the rest of youse.
Yeah, I was using Word, and was pleasantly surprised to see that NaNoWriMo added a few dozen words to my total.
To those of you who use Scrivener, I was thinking of getting it with the discount from NaNoWriMo: How do you like it? Positives/negatives?
50,268 
I used to be confused about the validation count since my word count is always identical to what NaNoWriMo tells me I get credit for, but I think I figured it out: some people are using programs that count hyphenated words as multiple words, and MS Word and NaNoWriMo’s counts don’t do that. So these writers who are unexpectedly coming up short are only doing so after getting credit for three words in their world procressor when they write three-year-old when they “should” only be getting credit for one word.
The other thing, at least in OpenOffice, and I think it’s incredibly stupid, is that apparently that program counts proper quote marks (the curly ones) as a word (but not straight ones). So if you have a lot of dialogue, the count is thousands of so-called words over.
And yeah, hyphenated words should be one word (which is a source of a small cheat - I dehyphenate a lot of words. )
2500 words to go (what do you mean I’m supposed to be working?) I’m skipping over anything I have to think about for more than 30 seconds. I well do it! Even if I have to stay up until midnight! Which isn’t likely, I hope!
a little over 4K to go. If I’m not done by 10 tonight (and I should be, but if I’m not) then it’s time to start calling everyone by their full names and removing contractions.
Still, I should make it.
My book two years ago had 20-something characters and a very tight timeline and structure. For that book, I needed to know “ok, it’s 4pm on Tuesday, so that means Scarlet is in the conservatory with the wrench, Mustard just left the kitchen, and White is about to walk into the ballroom with the rope but he does not know about Green’s suicide-by-revolver yet!”
I wasn’t using Scrivener, but I think it would have been a really useful tool for that kind of book. It will help you keep track of lots of characters and lots of scenes and stick to your outline and plot.
This year, I tried using it and I’m finding it annoying because my plot isn’t all that complex and I have far fewer characters and almost no outline. Scrivener is adding to my workload rather than taking away from it.
What all does Scrivener do? I use a combination of a mind map, some spreadsheets, and a portable wiki tool to keep track of stuff for my comic series, along with constantly making notes in the text in brackets (I picked it up from Piers Anthony, before I got sick of his writing).
Did it! Actually I cheated for the last 150 words and pasted in my comments from today in this thread, but I wanted to be done before I went home. I’ll write a little more tonight after dinner.
Congratulations to those who won this year! (And to those who even tried, unlike me. :D)
So, want to brag about your final counts?
91,594!
Still going strong, too. And a little bummed that I can’t use NaNo’s little word-count tracker anymore now that the month is over.