Yeah, I get to brag. I won NaNoWriMo for the second year in a row. It's true that I have miles to go before I sleep. Not only do I have to think about extensive rewriting, if I plan to finish this novel, but I am nowhere near even finishing the rough draft! And I don't know that I'll be able to finish it by tomorrow at midnight.
I am going to try! Even if I have to roughly sketch out the rest of the novel, at least I'll end up with a good, long, solid outline!
Current word count: 52,067
Saturday, November 29, 2008
For Current and Future Use: a PSA
Can I scramble my novel before submitting it to your untrustworthy word-counting goons?
If you are using Microsoft Word it is very easy to scramble your novel in a way that will not affect its word count.
Open the file and make a new copy of your novel using 'Save As...'
Open the Find and Replace dialog box (Edit -> Replace).
Click the "More" button to expand the box.
Check the "Use Wildcards" checkbox.
In the "Find What" field, put this: [a-zA-Z0-9] (include the square brackets, no spaces before or after)
In the "Replace With" field, put this: a
Click "Replace All"
Save the scrambled file as a text file, and upload away!
The procedure for Open Office is essentially the same, except that Open Office refers to 'Regular Expressions' instead of 'Wildcards'. (Thanks to Peter Dudley for this advice!)
You can get the same effect in a more cumbersome way by just doing a find-and-replace on every letter in the alphabet, one letter at a time. Open the find-and-replace interface on your word processing program and tell it to replace every "b" in your story with an "a," and every "c" with an "a," then every "d" with an "a." And so on.
If you are using Microsoft Word it is very easy to scramble your novel in a way that will not affect its word count.
Open the file and make a new copy of your novel using 'Save As...'
Open the Find and Replace dialog box (Edit -> Replace).
Click the "More" button to expand the box.
Check the "Use Wildcards" checkbox.
In the "Find What" field, put this: [a-zA-Z0-9] (include the square brackets, no spaces before or after)
In the "Replace With" field, put this: a
Click "Replace All"
Save the scrambled file as a text file, and upload away!
The procedure for Open Office is essentially the same, except that Open Office refers to 'Regular Expressions' instead of 'Wildcards'. (Thanks to Peter Dudley for this advice!)
You can get the same effect in a more cumbersome way by just doing a find-and-replace on every letter in the alphabet, one letter at a time. Open the find-and-replace interface on your word processing program and tell it to replace every "b" in your story with an "a," and every "c" with an "a," then every "d" with an "a." And so on.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
An excerpt:
“It’s The Cracked Cake Painting!” someone yelled, and they laughed. I didn’t know what they were talking about. “The Cracked Cake Painting” sounded so funny, but I understood the situation to be very, very unfunny. There was black goo all over the floor, and it could have been dye or ink, or paint. But I knew it to be blood. Black blood, all over the floor. Smeared all over the canvas. All over my hands. And Greg was standing in the doorway, hating me. Why couldn’t I remember the show? Why didn’t I know what was going on? Did anyone even care I was there? I was trapped in this little room, with Greg at the door, and a canvas smeared with dark colors in a room that otherwise was a dingy, gray broom closet, and I had black blood all over my hands and on the floor and in my hair…
And then I woke up.
And then I woke up.
Coming into the home stretch...
I plan on writing most of the afternoon while my parents are sleeping off the food coma, but this morning I cleared 45,000 words, so I am on the last leg of the word count challenge. I'd like to make it to 50K today so I might have a chance at finishing the story before the end of November as well, but we'll see how it all works out. I'm confident that, barring any major catastrophes *knock on wood* I'll be a NaNoWriMo winner for the second year in a row. But I suppose I shouldn't be counting my chickens just yet.
Current word count: 45,595
Current word count: 45,595
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