Another added benefit

Because I have to write this novel during whatever slivers of free time I have in my schedule, I found myself writing for about an hour while the girls had gymnastics lessons today. Imagine working on a novel while in a huge gym full of kids running around and coaches yelling instructions and parents gossiping over coffee. Throw in the siblings of the kids in class, bored and restless and underfoot.

Not conducive. Not exactly a room of one's bloody own.

But I managed to crank out a page or so in between helping with homework (my kid's and that of another random 5th grader there) and supervising my other child (and the other 5th grader's little sister) so that they were somewhere between entertaining each other and setting the place on fire. (It's a fine line, but if you're a parent, you've already had to walk it.)

So what I'm saying is that somehow, I've developed a way to concentrate in the midst of total chaos. Say it with me, now: "Whoo-hoo!"

Lisa suggested I keep a word count of the novel-in-progress on my blog. Not a bad idea. But which word count to use? The one automated by Word itself is probably more generous than an editor would consider. The method I'd learned about 15 years ago is to count words per line and lines per page and work out the average. And then there's the standard "about 250 words per (doublespaced) page." But for the sake of simplicity, I'll go with Word's calculation and then add some extra words (if possible) for insurance.

And drat. I found this note in a NaNoWriMo forum that addresses what one can include and what one can't include towards the final word count: "The only real limits are that it has to be written in November, and not beforehand." So ridiculously long (but new) chapter titles would count, but not the pages I'd written toward another novel and am incorporating into this novel - not, that is, until I have completed the necessary modifications to move them from 1st person to 3rd and from near-past to distant past. That is to say, I'll be re-writing and putting little bits and pieces from previous-year's notes in this new work, but until I actually put them there, I should not count them. This dramatically decreases my count. By like 5,000 words. Blast.


At any rate, kudos (read: are you insane?) to Josh for picking up the same gauntlet he threw down for me. We're on our way!