It’s a strange way down from the cradle to the hearse,
Take me back, oh, put me in reverse.
‘Cos you’ll never be the last one and you’ll never be the first.
Maybe we’ll all meet again in another universe.

Yay! NaNoWriMo over for another year. Just got a foreword to write, explaining how my world was conceived and I’ll be chucking it in the direction of Lulu, to gather dust for 12 months or so until I decide if it’s worth doing something with. Of the previous three I’ve finished, I have one I want to clean up, one I never want to see again and one I’m not sure about.

This year I’ve been particularly annoyed by OpenOffice.org. What I’ve written this year has been particularly dialogue heavy, and there’s a bug in OOo’s wordcounter that counts opening quotation marks as words. So, having carefully planned my last 5,000 words, I wrote my ending paragraph, was over 50k and rejoiced. Then I copied and pasted the manuscript into the word count validator. 48,800. At that point I was ready to explode. How do 1,200 words disappear? Cue frantic skimming through the manuscript, find bits here and there that could be extended. Two hours later, it verifies as 50k. That two hours was the worst of any NaNo experience I’ve had to date, but at least it’s over now.

This was all complicated by the fact that what I’ve written was originally intended to be a prologue of about 5,000 words to a completely different story, so with regard to plotting it’s very tight and there isn’t a lot of space for adding waffle. In terms of setting up the next part, it’s all done very well, but I suspect that part 2 will never be written (I’ve tried sequels before; I become too attached to the characters and have trouble doing things like killing them off).

Ah well, I have 50,000 words of fiction, telling a story. It’s just not the story I originally intended to write.