Well, I just validated my novel on NaNoWriMo to officially be made a winner of this year’s event. Hooray! I actually have barely been working on the novel this week because we had company up Saturday and Sunday, then we had Rook Monday night, Tuesday night, and almost all of today. I don’t write well when there are other people around. Something about being a good hostess; I dunno. At any rate, I am happy to have validated, and I collected my winner’s goodies (web badges and a downloadable certificate). The novel is still only two thirds done, but I hope to be almost finished with it by the end of the year (December is going to be busy with the crocheting class and all). Hooray!

An interesting and related side note, it’s fascinating to see the discrepencies between what my word processor (Open Office) gave as my word count and what NaNoWriMo gave as my word count. OO gave it as 86,852. NaNo gave it as 85,434. Out of curiosity, I copied and pasted the entire document into both Word Perfect and Microsoft Word. WP: 85,194. MW: 85,676. Without actually printing the entire mess out and counting it myself, I wonder which is actually closest. Each word processor handles special characters like em-dashes and colons and ellipses differently, so it’s hard to tell. The average of the four is 85,789. That puts MS closest. Fascinating. I guess I might be just about the only person who really thinks much about this, but I felt like posting about it anyway. 🙂

I’m tempted to stay up and write some more, maybe even finish a chapter before going to bed, but I’ve been pretty tired all evening and expect I’ll just get woken up several times by a four-legged furball stomping on me to find a place to keep warm, so I’m just as tempted to go to bed. I’m also tempted to mindlessly play WoW and kick on some movies on the Xbox or PS2. If I make tea, it’s going to be the book. If I drink a soda, then it’ll be WoW. If I drink water, it’ll be bed (until the three other glasses of water I’ve had tonight come back to haunt me and I have to get up and go to the bathroom). Meh. I’ll let you all go so some of you can wander off and baste turkeys. 🙂 Happy early Thanksgiving!