Sunday afternoon I'm counting up all my words from all the scenes I've written, most of them through the fabulously stern Dr. Wicked's Write or Die widget, and I'm excited because I'm ahead of schedule now - 38,203 words written, according to my math, and I should be at the 36,674 point. Yay me... so I go and start saving all these scenes into a big long (and I mean long!) document so I can upload it to the NaNoWriMo official word counter. And then I check the word count for the entire document, and it says, "34,959." What?!? Less than 35K?
Less than 35K? So where did it go? Is my math that bad? You wouldn't think someone with a degree in accounting would have that much trouble adding stuff... Oh, okay, forgot this little piece of a scene I wrote and somehow saved in the wrong spot; let's add that in. New count: 36,003. What!?! Where are my other two thousand words?!?
Turns out, see, that the WriteOrDie wordcount works differently than the OpenOfficeDocument wordcount - WriteOrDie being the cheerful optimist with rose-colored glasses, curse it. Totally out of character for a program that punishes you for seven seconds of no keystrokes by playing the most heeeedious noises you could imagine (babies crying, air raid sirens, untuned violins, shrieking alarm clocks, you name it). To get the noise to stop, all you have to do is start typing again. Simple but brilliant, right?
Actually, it is brilliant, and I'm going to keep using it. I'll just be checking word counts very thoroughly in a serious word-processing program from now on. New word count as of midnight, 11/22: 38,482. So there.
And the other thing I want to know is, Why is my face all broken out? Am I that stressed? It's not That Time, I haven't been eating loads of chocolate (all right, fine, I did have a square - ONE square - of NewTree Dark Chocolate with Ginger last week), and I haven't had any Diet Dr. Pepper, which, although I love it, tends to break me out. And I have been cleaning my face with the same cleanser and using the same brand of noncomodegenic makeup I always use. I don't get it.
Sonoma Scent Studio Tabac Aurea, custom samples of three versions: Zero Patchouli, Half the Patchouli of the Original, and Different Patchouli than the Original. Winner: 50% Patch. Gorgeous. Exactly what I wanted - pipe tobacco, dry leaves, grass, spice cookies, damp moss, golden sunshine, leather jacket, warm skin, and stolen kisses. Whoa baby. Laurie Erickson is a genius.
Chanel Bois des Iles, Les Exclusifs, decant: sandalwood, cool iris, warm gingerbread. Why does this seem thinner than my sample? It smells like the right smell, but disappears faster and has less presence.
Teo Cabanel Alahine sample: a mellow, happy Party In a Bottle, complete with "candles at the window, carols at the spinet."
Guerlain Chamade parfum de toilette, decant: a green-and-gold springtime. (Is it sacrilege to say that this is beautiful but not as good as Parfums de Nicolai's Le Temps d'une Fete? I'm sayin' it anyway. Luca Turin's right, Guerlain (LVMH) should hire Guerlain granddaughter Patricia de Nicolai as head nose.) In any case, I've now written the Chamade scenes into the novel. Now I can stop feeling so seasonally disoriented - no wonder I've been reaching for the cool-weather stuff when I'm not at the laptop. I can't believe, now, that for so many years I wore one perfume at a time. Freesia and peony in the winter? Thank goodness I can leave the whole "signature perfume" idea behind.
Top image is wordfind by thinkroni at flickr.com. Bottom image is Alahine, from fragrantica.com.
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