The Few, the Proud, the AI’s

Word count: 14,000 (inflated, see details below)

Now this NaNoWriter is truly disgusting. The pulps are dead, people! Please stop trying to revive them. According to another thread, Zette has written between six and nine novels this year, so a word count of 90,000+ isn’t unbelievable. No one has pointed out the obvious yet - Zette must be an Artificial Intelligence! Real people have the decency to keep it down to 25,000+, though a few are over 30,000.

I found Zette by accident, but you can also sort the author list by word count.. Quite a few people are done already. About 900 people are on-schedule out of 14,000, and 10% of the NaNoWriters are ahead of me. Considering that I’m a few days behind, that’s not many marathon runners in the lead. If I write 10,000 words today, and another 10,000 tomorrow, I could be a contenda. Of course, they’re all still writing, and who knows how many people either haven’t submitted their word count, or aren’t keeping it up-to-date? I’m not keeping mine up to date - I tend to stay away from the NaNoSite because of its time-sink tendencies (which this entry amply displays). It took me a while to realize that you could set your word count before the official counting begins on November 15th.

I have no idea how anyone is getting their word counts. My usual word counts are counts of actual words, where anything in the dictionary counts as a word. I have a little emacs-lisp script that does the counting. I have a LaTeX manuscript class that will count words the way editors do, which is by line-length in a fixed font, where a word is six characters (including spaces). I haven’t actually run it through LaTeX yet…hold on. Nice! According to LaTeX, I have 14,000 words, and 56 pages of double-spaced, 12pt Courier. And who’s to say I don’t?

One Response to “The Few, the Proud, the AI’s”

  1. Seema Says:

    I fall at your feet. I’m still hovering at somewhere around 6,000 words. I think I’m going to really have to push it out for the next few days - otherwise, I’m not going to make it!