I bashed out another 700 words yesterday morning to qualify and so officially did NaNoWriMo and got my valuable winners certificate along with millions of others.
It was a useful exercise in discipline, sticking to a target. It definitely increases your productivity and that’s what Teresa May wants. Unfortunately, in most jobs you don’t get any extra money for increasing your productivity – the CEO gets another 15% pay rise instead – which is why most British workers don’t bother.
This morning I got to 50,300 words on my nanowrimo escapade and thought I might as well paste the words into the box provided to get my badge or cup or whatever. It’s not a novel but a novella and a half. The half is Brigstowe Dragons III which is getting longer as I write (novelling makes you verbose) so long, in fact, that there will have to be a Brigstowe Dragons IV.
But, Lo! When I pasted it all in the nanobox it came up with a word count of less than 50,000 which it explains by telling me no two word counters work the same. I am 700 words short. It’s not good enough.
Since I was only using nano to train myself in bashing out 2000 words a day the result is irrellevant. It’s not even a novel. Still, it’s disappointing and may be crushing for someone who pounds the keys until midnight tonight, thinks they’ve just made it and then finds out that a dodgy word counter has condemned them to failure.
I may bash out 700 more words anyway as I still have to finish the book but this is a glitch I didn’t expect.
After three days at a dead stop with writing, I got going again today. I did eke out a few hundred words one day but I couldn’t be bothered to enter it in my daily totals on the site. Today I brought the total up to 40,876 words so less than 2000 a day to finish on time.
Whatever the flaws of the procedure – rushed work, artificial deadlines, low quality perhaps – it does make you produce. That is not to be sneezed at. The rough ore can be refined later, can it not? On the whole, it’s been a beneficial experience for me. Whether or not readers like the result, only time will tell.
