Twelve thousand words, a little more, is nowhere near on pace to complete NaNoWriMo's fifty thousand word target by the end of the month. I'm nevertheless not unhappy about it; this is as much as I have written in so short a time for years.
Chugging right along. There's no prize for "winning" NaNoWriMo other than a lovely certificate and your own stack of pages; it's not a high-stakes contest. It's a way to get yourself writing, if that's something you want to do, and to find out how it goes. And it's a way to find out how you work at longer lengths. Short stories are often drafted in a single sitting: you get an idea and put it down on paper, then go back later and polish. Novels don't work that way, not for most writers, and there's no way to learn it except by doing it.
About polishing: The Indiana Writers Center is running a short fiction contest and I wanted to enter a story I wrote awhile back. The contest had a 1000 word limit, and my story was 1068. Yikes! How could I possibly? Surely every word was necessary? But I sat down and gave it a couple of passes, tightening up language and eliminating excesses, gritting my teeth when I had to, using the running count in my word processor, which includes things like the title. It ended up at 990 words of story and I think it's better for it. It'll be some time before the judging, but the exercise was worth it.
Stupid question: How are words counted for such writings?
ReplyDeleteThat's not silly. Per word of body text, hyphenated words being somewhat debatable. Most word processors will do it for you, though they tend to count titles and other first-page matter (address, word count, byline). The way around that is to select just the stuff you want to count. Most word processors then display the selected count automatically, and if not, you can usually find it in the menus. The convention these days is to note it as "about NNNN words" at the upper left. rounding to at least the nearest ten. The shorter the work, the closer the count, especially for commercial work, since they still pay by the word.
ReplyDeleteWord count is such a basic function that when I couldn't find it easily in Apple's Pages, I went digging, on the assumption that it had to be there. It was. Pages spoils me; with a MacBook and two sizes of iPad, anything I write using it on any device shows up on all of them, and I can cut and paste it into my manuscript.
Question from a fellow Pages user.
ReplyDeleteI wrote my first two books using Pages on a first-gen iPad Air, and had no trouble with it. I have since upgraded to an iPad Pro with a newer version of Pages (12.2), and now I have a serious problem.
The ‘Add to dictionary’ function seems to be missing. I have followed the instructions from both the internal help guides and on Apple’s web site, all of which say that it should be under the ‘replace’ function that comes up when you tap on a word that was flagged as mis-spelled. But it’s not there.
Is there another way to make the Pages dictionary learn the spelling of words? Have I missed something obvious (entirely possible)?
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide, and good luck on your short story contest.
D.A. Brock
Here's one reader who is hoping we will see more in the Hidden Frontier worlds. If not, not. I'm just glad to hear you are writing fiction again.
ReplyDeleteRick T: You may be pleased to learn that the present project is a break from working on a novella set on one of the Hidden Frontier worlds, around the 1970s. The War is underway, farming is a critical enterprise, and... But that would be telling. I'm hoping to release that story as a low-priced Kindle book when it is complete. It's at about 15,000 words, most scenes written.
ReplyDeleteD. A. Brock: I haven't encountered that yet. Using Pages for drafts -- and occasionally dictating to the version on my phone -- I take whatever it gives me and fix it as I add it to the ongoing manuscript in a different ap, which I'm still learning. I will take a look on my iPads and see what comes up. Like Windows, Apple doesn't always put things quite where you first look, but the two often make divergent choices of inobvious plaaces.
Thanks, Roberta. Interesting. I know that Word (and IM, etc) shows me how many words I've used, but I never stopped to see how it was done.
ReplyDelete"Back in the olden days" typing was evaluated by how many lines had been typed, multiplied by the number of characters for which a line was set, divided by five - five characters' being the standard word length. Of course, that was before proportional spacing. This is similar to how you may have evaluated your code speed when you were studying to be a ham. As I recall, when I was first licensed (1955) a Novice license required 5 wpm send and receive speed while a Conditional or General license required 13 wpm and an Amateur Extra license required 20 wpm. A Technician's license had no code requirement.
Word count for writing serves two purposes: for calculation of payment and to get a rough idea how many-column-inches the piece will need when set for printing. It's all much easier these days, of course.
ReplyDeleteI worked out a long time ago that I average 254 words per page of monospaced, 12-point text, and used that in the days of typewriters. Still left me counting any partial pages by hand.
When I did my major ham-license upgrade over twenty years ago, I'd studied for the General and spent a lot of time copying the remianing shore stations, just letting it play in the background at work. Went in and took the tests, code first, and they were using a pretty detailed multiple-choice test to determine how well you copied. Aced the 13 wpm test, writing it all down, and the examiner asked if I wanted to try for 20. I figured I might as well (having no idea how fast I could copy, whatever the maritime services were running), and passed it, too. Went in to take the written and they just kept handing me new section; passed the General, then Advanced, but ran afoul of VE stuff on the Extra. So I was a 20 wpm Advanced for several years before I retook the Extra exam and passed. By then, the code requirement had been removed. So I guess I went from 20 wpm Advanced to no-code Extra.
Thanks for the history - interesting. I've known (one) people who could send/receive at 35 wpm while engaging in face/face conversation, drinking a beer, and smoking a cigarette. Well...not really. He didn't smoke or drink beer. I helped my husband increase his speed in order for him to test for his Amateur Extra while we were still in school, and taught code a few years later, but I'm back down to the 5-10 wpm range, now - on the rare occasion when I use it. My husband and I met on CW (I got a message to his buddy) before he transferred to my school as a junior. He was surprised when we met face/face that I was a woman!
ReplyDeleteYou are far beyond me, technically. I never went for the Extra and would surely have failed had I. That's pretty pathetic for one who completed requirements for a EE minor (but didn't get it because I transferred to a school that didn't allow physics majors to minor in engineering.)