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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.

Robert Jordan wrote a series of eleven massive Fantasy novels called collectively The Wheel of Time. He had intended to bring the series to a conclusion with a twelfth volume, although he clearly knew that this would be quite a task – he remarked at one stage that the twelfth book would be so large that the hardback edition would have to come with a shoulder-strap to enable you to lug it around.

Jordan very sadly died before he could complete the twelfth book. Fortunately he left behind a huge number of notes and rough drafts and audio recordings of what was to happen in the final book.

Brandon Sanderson was shoulder-tapped to finish book twelve. After working on the project for a year or so, he announced that there was still about 800,000 thousand words left in the story, and that he couldn’t possibly fit it into one book. (By way of comparison, 800,000 words is about two Lord of the Rings worth.) And so “book twelve” promptly became books twelve, thirteen, and fourteen. Book twelve has been released, and (after a few adventures in on-line ordering) my copy arrived today.

It really cracks me up that the twelfth book in a series of fourteen massive tomes would have a title with such a prelude-y feeling as “The Gathering Storm”.

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.

I went up to Nelson over the weekend, mostly to see my sister Imogen, across from Melbourne with her family for a couple of weeks.

By coincidence that Saturday I was there was the day that Lou&Buzz had chosen for their “barn-raising” – a communal effort to plant 500 truffle-fungus-impregnated oak trees on their property.

It was a good fun afternoon – the day was overcast so the work wasn’t too difficult, and so many people showed up that the whole lot was done in around three hours. We soon settled into a rhythm:

Lou&Buzz had previously laid out the stakes:

Buzz and a friend raced ahead at warp speed digging the holes:

An army of penitents followed along behind planting the treelets:

While dad and I and a couple of others followed along closing the wind breaks – a surprisingly tricky thing to get right:

In the final phase some more people sprinkled on the fertilizer.

And what did all the kids do while the grown-ups were planting trees? Why, they played on the Bouncy Castle of course!

The finished effect: