NaNoWriMo 2012 - Day 2

[ladyseishou]

Day 2 - 28 days remaining


The maker of a sentence launches out into the
infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson






Today's word count is 3,334! And because it's Friday, let's talk about backing up those words... It's not too early to think about it, Nano Writer! So what's your method of choice? Flash drive? Cloud drive? E-mail? Make it a habit now and you'll never have to worry about losing your work!

Questions? Comments? Excerpts to share? It's all good! So keep writing!

Comments

[ladyseishou]

You can definitely do as zombie suggested - it's the fastest method. But the validator is available and I recommend that you try it at least once to check your word count against the official count that the validator will give you before Nov 25. Sometimes there are discrepancies - both lower and higher counts. The NNWM validator is the only official word count that counts so to speak ;-) So plan accordingly.

You can find it by clicking on "Edit Novel Info" which you can find as a selection on the drop down menu if you set your cursor over the "My NaNoWriMo" tab near the top of the page.

That will take you to your "Edit novel" page. On this page you should see a blue box with the label: "Word Count" and under the blue box it should say "I am ready to validate my novel (Winning begins November 25!)". If you roll you cursor over this sentence, you'll see that it becomes clickable. Click it and a new mini window comes up that's labeled "Word Count Validator" and "Paste your novel below"

This is where you paste a COPY of your novel - make sure that you have another copy of your work somewhere else because once the validator counts the words in your novel, it dumps all the text - nothing is saved except your validated word count. I can't emphasize this enough: the NNWM site does not save a copy of your novel - just the word count!

After you have pasted in a COPY of your work, click on the submit button. After the validator is done (and it's pretty quick), you'll see you're back on your "Edit novel" page but now the blue box will show your official word count.

But you're not done yet. You need to click the "Save" button at the bottom of the page. Now your updated word count will be associated with your NNWM account.

And to restate something that zombie already said: the validator only works as a word counter until November 25. After that, you can upload a copy of your novel and if you have that magic 50K, you will have officially won the NNWM chalenge.

I hope I covered everything here. Let us know if it works out ok!

[zombie]

It's always good to write a few hundred words over 50K, too, just to be on the safe side. I'm lazy and don't validate until I'm done, so that's how I keep up with it.

Edit: Just ran mine through the validation and it was only off by ten words. I'm using yWriter to keep up with my wordcount, though, so that might have something to do with it.

[ladyseishou]

Ten words isn't bad. I've heard worse. I think a lot of the difference in word counts is based on hyphenated words and numbers. But you're right when you say that to be safe on validation day, to make sure you have a couple hundred words at least over 50K.

[zombie]

Nah, I was pleasantly surprised. I've had some nasty surprises here and there when using MS Word and Notepad.

[paceisthetrick]

Thanks so much!

Quick question: for today do I ADD the words I wrote the ones I did before (meaning put it all on the same Word doc) and repaste or do I simply do the new ones and the validator adds them to the count?

Sorry, newbie and all that! :)

[ladyseishou]

If you use the validator, paste in your whole novel that you've written so far as the validator does not keep any kind of accumulating total. For your own copy, you might want to keep your work in separate files (chapter one... chapter two... or scene 1... scene 2...) if that's the way you're writing your novel (I'm organized around scenes myself) but you might want to assemble the whole thing in a separate "super" file and then tack on your daily writing. Then upload the "super" file to the validator.

And remember to back up your writing at least once a week :-)

[zellieh]

If you want to keep track of your daily wordcount to monitor your progress, you can get spreadsheets people have made from the NaNo website, and there are also things like phone apps that monitor your writing. That way you'll have a record that you can keep, whereas the NaNo progress graphs will be wiped when NaNo's over.

I'm just saying, because this post -- How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words A Day To 10,000 Words A Day -- really inspired me and made me think about my productivity and what influences that, and I am much more productive when I'm writing at the library, with classical music on, than I am if stay at home, and I also need a large block of time to get into the story, so 15mins won't do.

[paceisthetrick]

This is great advice. Thanks so much!

[iosonochesono]

Do you know how to do a word or letter scramble? I can't figure out how and I really wouldn't want to submit the whole actual thing even if they don't save it XD

[ladyseishou]

If you have some sort of search and replace command for your word processor, you're good to go. Just search for wildcards or type in the alphabet or some subset (I find that replacing all the vowels with "x" makes for a pretty scrambled looking document) and replace said letters with "x" (or your letter of choice).

Of course please use a COPY of your work and give it a very obvious name like "My Novel - SCRAMBLED" so you never accidentally scramble your good copy.

Some word processors will do this for you :-) I know that Scrivener will do it during the compile.

[iosonochesono]

Thanks! I tried it on an unsaved copy of one of the chapters. I'd be unlikely to lose a whole copy because I break everything up into chapters, flashbacks, and then also the original story... I have a few ways of keeping the data backed up. (Plus, I have several copies of the folder on both my computer, flash drive, my other computer.)

It took a while but it worked - the example has nothing but Zs now hahaha.

[ladyseishou]

Zzzz! ;-)

[eien_herrison]

The easiest way is to do a find and replace. I know how to do it in MS Word (as that's what I've been using up until now) -- if you go to the advance options and make sure "use wildcards" is checked, you can simply put in [a-z] for find and whichever letter you want to replace it (I use q). Do the same for [A-Z] (which will replace all capital letters) and a couple of clicks later you'll have a letter scrambled document.

I'm pretty sure most other programs would have a similar function, it's just a matter of finding it (wildcard replacement is probably a good search term to start with).

[iosonochesono]

ANIMORPHS ICON.

I had to do it manually A-Y but it worked, thanks for the help.

[eien_herrison]

I specifically chose that one because of your icon + username :) I've still got all the books I bought on my bookshelf.

Yeah, I know MS Word has a function to do it automatically but I had no idea if any other programs did. Still, it works :)

[iosonochesono]

Yeah, I find my icon tends to bring out past or current Ani fans. Sadly, I don't have all the books anymore. I gave them away to AmeriCorps Sonoma Serves. I'm trying to collect them and am having a hard time with the last few because the popular ones from that time get really expensive to buy in decent condition.

I use LibreOffice, so, as long as something works (which it did!) I actually have MS Office since my computer runs both Mac and MS operating systems... But I haven't needed to use Microsoft OS (where MS Office is) since I passed my stats class. Someday when I have the time and energy I'll work on removing the boot camp partitioning on my hard drive.

(Also, your Animorphs icon: The art is from The Andalite Chronicles and it's an Andalite's iris, not a hawk. It's the Animorphs meeting Elfangor in the construction site in theory :3

/end geek moment)

[eien_herrison]

It certainly does -- I've used that icon over at LJ a few times and gotten some nice responses/replies about it. I dislike throwing away books (my husband laughs when I cringe and shudder when someone cracks the spine of a book, folds down pages, or otherwise) so I have a lack of real space.

Regarding my icon: thanks! I've been wondering where the art originally came from; I found it years ago and it had no credit, note, or anything, so I just randomly guessed (I have the Andalite Chronicles, but not any of the pretty art I've seen some people have).