My little word count ritual (+crusade +blogfests +chrysalis)

Now that I've followed all you Crusading folks, the trick is to actually keep up with your posting. And that will be no mean feat, I'm guessing. Every time I venture into Google Reader, I get through a handful of your updates before something else comes up and I have to abandon the task. But I do intend to do my best.

Hi to those new folks I haven't said hi to yet! Great to be in touch with you all! This Crusading thing is pretty awesome, eh? (Thanks Rachael!! And yes I learned to spell your name correctly now :D).

Just a heads up, I added a page to my blog for upcoming Blogfests. This was basically to help me out and remind me what's coming up, but it may be of interest to some of you too! Although we have the Crusade to contend with, I think it's cool to keep in mind the other stuff happening out there. I did also see a Blogfests page on another blogger's...errr, blog (how many times did I say 'blog*' in this sentence?), but I had already had the idea to add the page when I saw that. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Hehe.

Anyway...today I was a bit disappointed, because I couldn't complete the day's ritual in regards to SUNDOWN's word count. This is sort of a long story (when I write it, anyway...I do tend to bloviate a fair bit you know :D), so brace yourselves. My ritual involves checking my word count at work everyday. From the moment I started revising SUNDOWN, my goal has been to cull my word count. Biiiig time. Because at the end of my first draft (not rough draft but first complete draft), my word count was a whopping 147k. I first reported on this (and my progress with editing) here. Since then I've managed to get my word count down to about 110k. And for a contemporary romance novel, that's still too long. But I'm working on it!

Anyway, back to the story. Counting words! As we all know, word counts vary (sometimes rather wildly) across word processing programs. And when I'm working on my novel at home I use Scrivener (which is awesome if you don't know). But Scrivener has a downside (when you're trying to cut words; when you're trying to add them it's more of an upside :D), which is that it gives a larger word count than other programs, or at least it gives a bigger word count than Word does. I have Word at work, so each day I must take my novel with me to work. Lately this has consisted of emailing it to myself.

And finally we get to the point of this little ramble. This morning I eagerly downloaded my document and eagerly opened it to find out my latest word count. And it was the same as yesterday's!! I had emailed the wrong copy to myself, so I couldn't get an up to date word count.

It disappointed me a little more than it probably should have. And I confessed to one of my critiquing partners that I apparently have no life. :P

I suppose I've just confessed it to a lot more!

But that's okay. It's all part of us getting to know one another!

Tomorrow I will not be downloading the wrong version, because I will have sent the correct version to myself! After tonight's edits, of course.

And I think that's all I've got to say for now! Except that I am writing this week's Chrysalis story (see Prompt #8) and I think it's going to be fun. Don't worry, nobody dies in this one. Hehe.