Fascinatin'

[pjthompson]

Quote of the day:

"He who still sees the stars as 'up' does not perceive with the eye of truth."

—Friedrich Nietzsche


Writingness of the day: I've passed the 9k words cut mark, which is almost halfway to my goal of 20k. Unfortunately, I'm on the last third of the ms. So when I finish this read through, which is also integrating the three critiques I received, I'll let the whole mess sit for a week, then read through it again with a concentrated eye on killing words. Kill, kill, kill! Take no prisoners!

But here's an irritating thing: on three different computers with three different versions of Word I get different word counts in SMF--PC using Word 2000, work Mac using Word 98, home Mac using Word 2004. And I'm not talking about a few words difference, I'm talking about a 3-4000 word difference! It's the same file, with the same margins set, but a vastly different page count between the three platforms. I do not understand this at all. This difference pretty much disappears when I use the Word line count, so I may be forced to use that. It's higher than my lowest SMF count (on Word 98), whine, whine.

(And yeah, I did that 60 characters across the page, 25 double-spaced lines down the page to make sure I wasn't doing something dippy.)

So if the SMF word count for Night Warrior/The Making Blood on Word 98 was 187k, that means it's even longer than I thought and that means . . . I don't want to think about it.

In other fascinating writing news (because I know the above paragraphs were riveting), my final cut on "Eudora's Song" is 6,200 words. I've managed to bring it down from the bloated first draft of 10k words. It's a much better story for it. But I still don't think it hits the spot, exactly. It's just done for now and--out it goes.

You're getting sleepy...sleepy...

Here's something to wake up merebrillante:

Comments

[merebrillante.livejournal.com]

'Mlo? Who's that? Who turned the light on?

Oh. It's you.

Thanks for the wake-up call, PJ. I owe you a Hugh Jackman.

Oh, and by the way, when I checked word count on NW/TMB, it was significantly less than 186K, but I can't recall by how much. And that was just Word's count, and on a Mac yet.

[pjthompson]

The problem comes in the different methods of calculation. In Word's word count on a Mac (well, my work Mac) NW is 159,605. Since that's not a particularly accurate count, I use the line count and add a zero to the end, thus getting 182,280. And in SMF word count (60/6x25x746) it's 186,500. SB comes out as 121,591 in Word's word count. Maybe I should just declare victory, leave the field of battle and use Word's word count. :-/

And in more important news: Have you seen Rickman in Mesmer? It looks intriguing.

[merebrillante.livejournal.com]

And in more important news: Have you seen Rickman in Mesmer? It looks intriguing.

No, I'd never even heard of it. Was that where this photo was taken from?

[pjthompson]

Yup. Available on Amazon. Mesmer was a sexy guy.

[merebrillante.livejournal.com]

Yeah, he's a real Sven-jolly.