Little Help From Our Fledgling Friends...

[kinzel]

I'll be putting this in several places...so if you see it twice, it may not be your imagination, after all.

We need some ...odd... help with Theo while other things are in process: namely, we need to get a word count on the *actually online* Fledgling.

Why is this, you wonder? Don't the authors have *one good copy*? Well... no. We have chapters hung on the web, that's what we have.

It turns out, on inspection, that Fledgling, so far has been written on two different laptops, 5 or 6 different desktops, and an AlphaSmart. OS involved? two different Mac OS, AlphaSmart's whatever, WinXP, and at least these in Linux: -- Kubuntu, Mandriva, Linspire, Freespire, and Xandros.

Portions have been written in several varieties of OpenOffice, Kword, GoogleApps, whatever AlphaSmart uses, two different versions of WordPerfect, ViM, Notepad, and (alas), even MicroSoft Word. And, for the most part, the originals are still on the machines they were written on.

So -- does anyone out there have a current word count (or could you generate one) from the web stuff? Please understand that historically we get different word counts for the same document when using OpenOffice and WordPerfect, and Word apparently counts in some world of Microsoft's making.

Why all this? Well, we've been busily doing other things and we need to make some decisions regarding Theo's story...RSN.

Thanks!

Comments

[orlacarey.livejournal.com]

You'll have the Microsoft Word count by the COB ;)

[starthorn.livejournal.com]

Steve;

I've been keeping a single word doc of Fledgling. According to MS Word:
Pages: 185
Words: 96,047 (Note this includes the authors running notes that are on the web pages as well)
Characters (no spaces): 444,648
Characters (with spaces): 559,733
Paragraphs: 193

Will send a copy of the word doc to SRM_at_Korval.com

Regards;
Stan

Rough word count

[masgramondou.livejournal.com]

approx 95000

note this may include some ====== lines, the "Chapter X"es and author notes and is according to Open office. Basically I pasted in all content from the opening ==== to the -0- for each chapter into OO and told it to count. I got 95108 or something like that

Re: Rough word count

[masgramondou.livejournal.com]

Odd that starthorn is almost exactly 1000 words longer. Must be what we are inserting into the doc. If you wish I too can send you the doc I have

Here you go:

[orlacarey.livejournal.com]

Lays it out by chapter (http://orlacarey.livejournal.com/826796.html). Not including notes or chapter titles I get 95,419 in MS Word. Notes from authors are an additional 456

Word Count using OpenOffice.org 2.2.0

[craig trader (by livejournal.com)]

Here are the word counts using OpenOffice.org 2.2.0. Methodology: I included everything from 'Chapter X' up to but not including '-O-'. This includes a lot of authorial notes, but presumably you'd count those as well during the first draft.

Re: Word Count using OpenOffice.org 2.2.0

[craig trader (by livejournal.com)]

These counts were from the website, mirrored today around 9am EDT. The underlying files were timestamped from 2007-01-24 to 2007-09-30.

Re: Word Count using OpenOffice.org 2.2.0

[sraun]

That's amusing - wc -l chap*.html on the 30 chapters to date gives 85,824 words, 16,569 lines, 828,912 characters.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

No count from here, but I find amusement that no two counts come out the same. Little things please little minds...

Word count from Open Office

[(Anonymous)]

My copy in Open Office counts 95,952 words and 560661 characters including notes and =====.
Just out of curiosity, would you mind posting the averages?
Thanks

Re: Word count from Open Office

[kinzel.livejournal.com]

I'll be happy to have someone appoint themselves statistician. Volunteers?

I can report the curious fact that editors *know* novel word counts are a bit wonky. That's one reason some editors still insist on the count words/page for so many pages and then multiply by total pages and others insist on the old "average word is 5 characters, so how many words do you have?" ...

Re: Word count from Open Office

[masgramondou.livejournal.com]

I don't understand why my count is low by c.1000 words compared to everyone else. When I paste the same text out of OO 2.3 and into Roughdraft I get 24 less words (950098 vs 950074) so it doesn't seem to be an OO2.3 bug. However looking at the text I can't see that I missed obvious bits of your deathless prose.

Re: Word count from Open Office

[craig trader (by livejournal.com)]

It seems to me that everyone's using slightly different methodologies for counting words. Do you have a preferred way to count? Did you want the authors notes included/excluded?

It didn't take that long to run through with OO.org 2.2; I could do it again to verify. I could also run the same set of files through MS Office 2003. I'd just prefer to produce numbers you can use...

[(Anonymous)]

Here's my two cents worth:

Pages 183
Words 96,077
Characters (no spaces) 444,652
Characters (with spaces) 560,309
Paragraphs 198
Lines 8,324

This from Word '03 and includes all of the author comments.

Word Counts

[stick-breaker.livejournal.com]

The total is Easy,

Not nearly ENOUGH!! ;-)

More Please!

Word Count from MS Works Processor 2003

[(Anonymous)]

Burton from Montreal

I got 96406 words for Fledging with MS Works Processor 2003. Mind you that includes everything minus the annoying multiple repeating words phases like "she she" that crops up.

My copy of Fledgling comes to 287 pages due to reformatting to larger font for printout in weekly booklets. It also been edited for spelling and different fonts for the various methods of speech.