I won! Or did I?

by Jennette,

Wednesday night, I hit a milestone: at last, the word count meter in the status bar of WriteWayPro registered 50,123. I was done with my NaNoWriMo novel!

I actually finished the novel a few days earlier, on Sunday night… with a word count of only a little over 46,000. Not enough. But I’d left a bunch of plot holes and dropped subplot threads, which I’d normally tackle in revision. Instead of moving to another project, I decided to tie some of those up, and that got me to 50,123 on Wednesday night.

I was elated! I exported my document to Word, fearing my word count would change, and it did – to 50,006. But that’s still over 50,000, right?

I entered my new wordcount into the NaNoWriMo website, and the “I’m ready to validate my novel” link appeared. I pasted my whole dang book in…

And no winner bar appeared. Instead, the wordcount I’d entered now read 49,926. What???!!

So I went back and added that author’s note, just a short one. Re-exported, and re-entered. This time, I made it over 50,000 words and got my Winner! graphics.

Here’s the details on my ROW80 goals for this past week:

  • Finish NaNoWriMo novel – Done!
  • If NaNo novel is less than 50k, write author’s note and/or nonfiction project to add up to 50k – Done!
  • Physical activity 5x this week – partial – I got it in 4x
  • Hangar 18 – review and markup Chapters 13 & 14 – Done!

Here are my overall goals for this round:

  • Format and release OVRWA holiday story anthology – Done and now available!
  • Revise Hangar 18 – revisions/markup done, corrections typed in through Chapter 10 (of 14)
  • Keep up with my exercise, five times a week – ongoing
  • Win NaNoWriMo -Done!
So that means I’ve already met my revised ROW80 goals, how about that??
But I’m not going to take the next two and a half weeks off. There’s still much to be done, although with the holidays coming and all the extra to-do that entails, I am going for small goals. So for this week, I’d like to:
  • Hangar 18 – finish type-in
  • Hangar 18 – get answers for new/remaining few research questions, and send to editor
  • Hangar 18 – put together book info sheet (blurbs of varying lengths, and other details needed for publishing)
  • Physical activity 5x this week

If you’re participating in ROW80, how are you doing so far? If you’re doing NaNoWriMo, how did you do? And either way, have you ever finished a big task, only to find out that you weren’t finished after all?

Jennette Marie Powell writes stories about ordinary people in ordinary places, who do extraordinary things and learn that those ordinary places are anything but. In her Saturn Society novels, unwilling time travelers do what they must to make things right... and change more than they expect. You can find her books at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Kobo, iTunes, and more.

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