NaNoWriMo: I am NOT cheating!
(Cue music of self-justification)
Day three lunch and I'm on target once again. How I reached it, though, has now become slightly more complicated.
See, before Stephen Blackmoore challenged me to this wacky carnival race of words, I'd already been planning my second novel, and I'd also written about 5000 words as a test run. My plan for NaNoWriMo was to continue from there, only counting completely new words.
Instead, I rewrote the beginning from scratch with renamed and reworked characters, and a different ordering of scenes. The counter on the main page of this blog shows how many of these new words I've written.
Now we get to the self-justification.
Last night I reached a scene that I knew I'd already written and didn't want to throw away. It took an hour and a half to incorporate this old version of the story into the new one, rewriting so it would fit. The next scene I wrote from scratch with an all-new character, then the same thing happened again.
So I cheated. For the second time.
In total, I added about 3000 words to my NaNo-novel. 3000 words I wrote before November. But there's nothing to worry about here, move along people, no trouble at all. This guy is not a criminal.
My promise to everyone out there in NaNo-land is that whenever I update my counter, I will mentally subtract those 3000 extra words.
Trust me. I know what I'm doing.
11 comments:
HEY! Object oriented writing! I like it! ;)
What counter?
The counter on the right, under 'NaNoWriMo 2006'. The one that 'counts' my word 'count'.
Get it?
And hey, I wrote it in PHP all by myself. Praise the Mac!
Cheater! Cheater!!
Does that mean I can count the 23,004 words I already had?
Hey! I said I'm NOT counting those words. I'm NOT cheating.
Why, you, you ...
baiter.
:)
Too funny. Hey dude, whatever works...
And I really wanna know the code for your meter (I'm a mac woman, too - not that you're woman, or anything). Zokutu's web page has been suspended & word meters have crashed throughout blogland. At least mine's disappeared.
Invoke the Zokoutu clause. That allows you to work on material that's already been written, books that need to be finished, etc. So you didn't cheat. : )
Look, you're writing crime fiction.
Cheating is required as part of the research. So you can understand how it feels, how it works, if you can pull it off.
You're just doing what it takes to be a better writer. ;)
Hmmm, seems a little sketchy to me. ;)
Hey, whatever works! As long as you aren't counting them, I won't tell.
Classic! Three different perspectives on crime, cheating, and writing.
I love it!
Ya know, all this word counting stuff sounds like a bunch of guys in the locker room comparing packages.
Except here we force each other to make those packages bigger, every day!
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