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Well, that’s another NaNo down. This year 167,354 people signed up. Of them 98,045 wrote more than one word, and 32,166 ‘won’ (defined as writing 50,000 words or more). Collectively we wrote 2,147,483,647 words. Sixteen people claim to have written more than a million words (the current version of the website can’t record more than 999,999 words for a particular person). Some of these claims I believe, others are clearly false.

I really enjoyed it, although I am less happy with what I produced this year than last, and I’m sure I’ll be up for it again next year.

It turns out that yesterday’s declaration of a win in this year’s NaNoWriMo was premature. OpenOffice had told me that my word count was 50,024, but when I submitted my world-class prose to the official NaNo validator, it decided there were only 48,800 words. Say what??? Of course there are lots of different defensible positions as to what constitutes a word, but could a 1200-word discrepancy really be down to differing interpretations? Nope. It turns out that OpenOffice’s word count algorithm is broken, and has been for some time. You heard right ladies and gentlemen – OpenOffice Writer wants to be a serious competitor for Word and yet it can’t even count words!

I don’t know exactly what the problem is, but it gets confused by custom quotes (= smart quotes in Word parlance):

“

counts as one word,

”

counts as one word, while

“Hello”

(with curly quotes) counts as two words and

"Hello"

(with straight quotes) counts as one word. Go figure.

Effectively, in a novel context, what this means is that every line of dialogue adds one extra word to the overall count which shouldn’t be there.

This is a known problem, and unfortunately the OpenOffice team show no interest in fixing it, as it’s been present for several versions.

So anyway I pounded out a few hundred more words today, and now I have 51,800 words according to OpenOffice and 50,700 according to the NaNo validator, so I have my win back again. But what a pain.

I made it past the 50,000-word line on my NaNoNovel, and on the 16th of the month too.

As I am going to Auckland this weekend, I had always intended to do a big push at the beginning of the month so that I could slide for the three days I would be away and still be ahead of the curve. I had originally intended to make sure I got to 40,000 before going to Auckland, then when I passed that number on the weekend I realised 50,000 before going to Auckland was in range, and even then I got there with days to spare.

So: I’ve cranked the words out – are any of them any good?

During last year’s NaNo the story seemed much more cohesive. I could see the basic outline of the story right from the beginning, and pretty much everything I wrote will probably feature in the finished book in some form.

This year, things were very different. I only had the vaguest of ideas, and I spent lots of words typing up Science Fiction scenes that I’ve had running around in my head with no thought for how or even if they could fit into the same story. It’s really only in the last 10,000 words or so that I think I’ve hit on what might be a usable story.

Ah well, it’s good to be over the finish line anyway.

I’m doing NaNoWriMo again this year. Last year I got to the required 50,000 words easily, and I thought that what I had written was the core of a pretty decent Fantasy novel. I resolved to flesh it out into a finished novel in short order and… didn’t. I don’t think I went back to it at all after November was over.

Sigh. Maybe this year right?

Well, I’m trying SF this year, with a story called n-Space. Yeah I know that Larry Niven used the term decades ago, but hey: all things are fair in love and war and NaNoWriMo.

It’s a full month this year, so it’s going to be a much harder target than last year, but I’m determined to succeed anyway.

They’ve opened the validator for official wins now, so I submitted my manuscript. My official wordcount is 56,121, and thus I have now “won” NaNoWriMo 2008! Yay me! (And the twenty thousand or so other people who will also “win”.)

NaNo has been a blast, every bit as fun and productive as I had hoped, and I can’t wait for next year.

However, there’s still a whole heap of work to do – my 56,000 words contains the bare bones of a decent story, but there’s still lots to be done before I can take it out for walks in public without embarrassment.

Well. It’s been a funny old couple of days. On Thursday night I was suddenly struck down by some very nasty bug. I felt so awful on Friday – sicker than I can remember being in years. I struggled to keep my word count up, but only managed 1300 words all day, and it was torture. I spent the rest of the day sleeping and eating barley sugars. Then I went to bed early and slept through the night. I felt right as rain in the morning. It being a lovely fine day I got up and went for a hike in the hills, thinking about the next scene I wanted to write. When I got home I sat down at the computer, and it flowed out without effort and without me having to so much as pause for thinking. 8,907 words later, the scene was done and I had cracked the magical 50,000-word mark. I’ve won NaNoWriMo, and on day 15! Yay me! What’s more, I reckon that the scene I wrote today was some of the best writing I’ve ever done. I haven’t been back to review it yet – a big NaNo no-no – so I won’t know until December if it’s any good. But for now I don’t care – I reckon I done good.

The story is still only half-finished, so I fully intend to carry on, but at a much more sedate pace.

I managed to crank out 6,701 words today. Wahoo! This is almost certainly the most I’ve ever managed to write in a day, ever. And none of it was waffly filler either – it was all stuff that I’m sure will be in the final novel, as I currently conceive it, in some form or other. This takes the total to 35,173 words, well over two thirds of the way there. Double wahoo!

Hooray! I got past the half-way point today, and am at present sitting on 25,872 words. I may be half-way in terms of number of words, but sadly not in terms of effort. The problem is that I’ve got to the end of what I had planned in advance, and I’m starting to struggle a bit. I have a whole bunch of scenes, some of which don’t connect well with each other, there are some key plot points I haven’t figured out yet, and I don’t know how it all ends. I don’t want to just waffle at random – I want each scene I write to at least potentially serve the story in some important way, but I can’t do that if I’m hazy on what the story actually is! So, I might have to slacken off the pace a bit and do some more plotting…

Huzzah! Made it past 10,000 words (20%). The count at this stage is 10,959.

I clocked up another 3,200 words today, for a total of 7,466 – well ahead of my 6,000-word quota for the weekend.

The format of the event – the emphasis on quantity rather than quality – is certainly freeing. I found that whenever I got stuck or bored with a scene, I just switched to another one almost in mid sentence, without worrying about how the characters got there.

We also had a meeting of Christchurch “WriMoes” at the Arts Centre. About ten people showed up and we discussed wordcounts and swapped writing anecdotes and so forth while sitting out in the sun. It was pretty cool, and it was interesting to see how varied the WriMoes are – from old crusties like me to school kids who were complaining that their parents hadn’t allowed them to stay up for the Nov 1 00:00:01 launch.

The one bull in the ointment is that the NaNo site has been so heavily thumped in the last couple of days that it’s essentially useless. A big part of the fun is logging your progress and checking on others’, but it’s essentially impossible at the moment. I hope demand drops away and the site becomes usable again soon – but it would be sad if people fell by the wayside just because the site was unusable.