[CONTEST OVER] JNC Original Light Novel Contest
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@jazzyjeoff it's been hard to find the space to write with all the reading light novels and anime, not to mention all the other stuff I have to do...
But I have hope that I get back on track soon -
@Lily-Garden Well, good luck—and as long as you enjoy it —keep with it!
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@jazzyjeoff Even if we get hundreds of submissions, I bet there will be hundreds more people will have started but never finish. And then of those hundreds, maybe 10s will be fondly remembered by their authors and years later they will finish the story and self publish or apply to the 13th JNC original light novel contest or something and win.... so many things could end up originating here in the future, I can't wait.
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I'm 47K words in now and I think I've sorted out the inconsistencies, MacGuffins and plot holes, but it's hit a sort of mid-life lull where I can see that nothing much is going to happen for a chapter or three. For my usual storytelling style, that's no problem because the less plot there is, the more PLOT I can have, but trying to keep things safe enough for Auntie Amazon is getting really difficult!
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Just wrote a chapter that was the exact opposite of my painful chapter. I just thought I needed a filler chapter between two big events and ended up creating two characters that I really like and will continue through the story. It is so much fun when something like that just falls out of the sky!
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Alright, 3 weeks in and 16k total words so far. I should hopefully reach my goal of 75k words before the first week of January, which gives me a week or so of wiggle room to do whole-draft edits.
We'll see how it goes, but so far so good.
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Ha! I changed the name of my main character over a month ago and I’m still finding her old name sprinkled throughout my story. Of course, if I was using the most simple word editing program I could just do a find and replace—but I am using Wattpad as my editor. Why? I have a bizarre form of laziness—instead of making the one-time tiny effort required to use the right tool for the job—I use something perfectly awful that makes things needlessly inefficient every-single-day. I might as well just use a manual typewriter—at least that would be romantically ineficient —of course, I am much too lazy to actually find a typewriter…
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Still only at 49K words. 2K in 20 days isn't very promising for finishing by the deadline, but my story seems to have gone beyond mid-life lull and entered mid-life crisis mode now! Actually I've written more than 2K because I realised that the part I've been working on would need to fit in with something from a later volume (if it ever gets written) so I wrote a few pages from volume 4 as well just to avoid a possible retcon later on.
@jazzyjeoff, I used to love my manual typewriter, I gave it away to a charity years ago though otherwise you could have had it :)
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@Angelus said in [SUBMISSIONS NOW OPEN!] JNC Original Light Novel Contest:
Still only at 49K words. 2K in 20 days isn't very promising for finishing by the deadline, but my story seems to have gone beyond mid-life lull and entered mid-life crisis mode now! Actually I've written more than 2K because I realised that the part I've been working on would need to fit in with something from a later volume (if it ever gets written) so I wrote a few pages from volume 4 as well just to avoid a possible retcon later on.
@jazzyjeoff, I used to love my manual typewriter, I gave it away to a charity years ago though otherwise you could have had it :)
Ha! From where I stand 49k words sounds like bragging!
(laughing at me —not you, btw) -
Right, that's another 20K words tossed into the bin as I rejig Motive & Means a third time. Hopefully I'll be able to recycle at least some of it. Writing mysteries is such a pain...
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@zwabbit
20k ouch!
That's sort of the demon in the back of my mind, as I decide whether to give my villain a full detailed flashback backstory—or just do it with a much shorter exposition—the exposition would be much easier and has less of a chance of breaking up the flow of the story—but a flashback might draw the reader into the world to greater level and make them understand the villain more than “because evil.” -
Is there an official, industry accepted definition for word count? I'm writing a python script for my own manuscript to tally up the word counts of chapters and for-author-organization-only sub-chapters for easier tracking than relying on manual calculations within my standard document editor. I just don't know whether hyphenated words should count as multiple words, or (not that my story has them but for the sake of program completeness) whether things like stat blocks which have like [+] buttons rendered with text would count as words.
I don't plan to get anywhere near the 100k limit so it shouldn't matter insofar as staying within the bounds of the contest, and I imagine y'all would allow for quite a bit of leeway if the stated word count on the entry form differed from your own calculation of the word count when looking at the manuscript but I would still feel embarrassed if my own totals were off :P
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@Hylebos no there isn't without requiring people use a particular software, etc.
It's not a super strict limit... If by some reasonable word count system it's less than 100K then you should be fine.
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@Hylebos Assuming your [+] are counted, if they are less than one percent of your total words, you'd be hard pressed to see them even come up. For example, 1% of 99k is 990. Which means even 1k short of 100k, you'd still be fine at 99990.
I've rabbit holed way too much on this and now I have a regex to count freestanding special characters for some reason, (?<!\S)[^\w\s]+(?!\S). If that regex doesn't exceed 1k in your file, you'd be hard pressed to ever see the difference in how words are counted even if [+] was counted.
As a general rule though, I think a word contains at least one alphanumeric (\w) character. So freestanding special characters probably aren't counted. That's how it works in Google Docs at least.
Edit: This is a quick regex which gives me the same word count as Google Docs. \w[\w-—']*
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After another three weeks, up to 40k words so far. Averaging 7.5k words a week now like my goal. Halfway done, though! Probably another six weeks to finish the first version.
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I just found out about this and it sounds like so much fun!
I have a villainess video game LN-inspired novel I’ve been working on off and on for the past year so this is just the push I need to finish it up! Currently it’s around 40K words.
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Well, it doesn't look like this is going to get done, though now I have an idea of what 90% of it should look like. My best bet is to just cut my story in half—find a sort of ending point and maybe I could hit 50K words—but given that I still find glaring errors in the fanfic that I wrote a year ago —I am a little apprehensive at the idea.
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@jazzyjeoff well I think that's still impressive. I have only reached 4k because I keep getting distracted by anime, webcomics, and Vtubers...
If I'm super lucky I will have a draft to send in by the deadline...
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@jazzyjeoff Perfect is the enemy of success. Whatever you need to do to get the words flowing, do it.
@Lily-Garden said in [SUBMISSIONS NOW OPEN!] JNC Original Light Novel Contest:
I keep getting distracted by anime, webcomics, and Vtubers...
The eternal struggle✊
In other news, it looks like the word count minimum has been lowered to 35k?
There are also 77 days until the deadline. So even just 500 words a day should get you there! I think there's still time!
