NANOWRIMO Somewhat By The Numbers
If you want to know what I personally think is the best NANOblog on the web (which I'm sure everyone is waiting on with baited breath), it's Writing Sya.
What I love about her blog is that I think she's the only NANOer out there who both blogs and is a bigger stat geek than I am. Whenever I'm trying to put off writing, I like to do various searches under the Authors tab on the site. And in the past I've published some of that research on here. But Sya, she takes it to an art form.
Today she compiled a list of how many average words there are per genre.
Erotic Fiction leads the way with a 4403 word mean amongst all people who noted this as their genre of course.
Chick Lit is last with 3345.
The odd thing about that descrepency is that the ML in the Chicago region joked at the Kickoff Party that she's labeled her story as Chick Lit because she didn't want parents to see she was writing Erotic Fiction. I'm wondering if that's actually a common experience.
The labeling of genre is always an interesting thing in NANOWRIMO. There is a discussion every year on the Literary Fiction boards asking what can be classified in the king of all genres. :) And really it's not an exclusive club.
The only thing that separates it from general fiction is that we're all full of ourselves (and of course focusing more on the internal emotion rather than external action). ;)
Well a lot of people are full of themselves this year as Lit Fic is the fourth most chosen genre behind Other, None Listed, and, of course, Fantasy (with 9545 people classifying it as their genre). This may be the first year, however, that Literary Fiction outpulls Science Fiction.
Preach on my internal monologue heavy, plot light brothers and sisters!
---
Speaking of stats, the first week's numbers came out in the Chicago v. Toronto city word war and they're not good.
As of the official count this morning, Toronto is ahead 303,841 to 190,693.
Well at least that's what one of our two captains posted. Thankfully I kept a spreadsheet of my own. We're actually only behind 303,841 to 256,536. Still that's about 1,500 words (or basically one day) per member of the team.
What's killing us is that Toronto has four writers over 20,000 already and we have one. Our 10,000+ people are even (13) and we only have one more 0 person than they do. So I guess I'm part of the problem as I'm still at 7,500 or so.
I'll have to remedy that tonight.
What I love about her blog is that I think she's the only NANOer out there who both blogs and is a bigger stat geek than I am. Whenever I'm trying to put off writing, I like to do various searches under the Authors tab on the site. And in the past I've published some of that research on here. But Sya, she takes it to an art form.
Today she compiled a list of how many average words there are per genre.
Erotic Fiction leads the way with a 4403 word mean amongst all people who noted this as their genre of course.
Chick Lit is last with 3345.
The odd thing about that descrepency is that the ML in the Chicago region joked at the Kickoff Party that she's labeled her story as Chick Lit because she didn't want parents to see she was writing Erotic Fiction. I'm wondering if that's actually a common experience.
The labeling of genre is always an interesting thing in NANOWRIMO. There is a discussion every year on the Literary Fiction boards asking what can be classified in the king of all genres. :) And really it's not an exclusive club.
The only thing that separates it from general fiction is that we're all full of ourselves (and of course focusing more on the internal emotion rather than external action). ;)
Well a lot of people are full of themselves this year as Lit Fic is the fourth most chosen genre behind Other, None Listed, and, of course, Fantasy (with 9545 people classifying it as their genre). This may be the first year, however, that Literary Fiction outpulls Science Fiction.
Preach on my internal monologue heavy, plot light brothers and sisters!
---
Speaking of stats, the first week's numbers came out in the Chicago v. Toronto city word war and they're not good.
As of the official count this morning, Toronto is ahead 303,841 to 190,693.
Well at least that's what one of our two captains posted. Thankfully I kept a spreadsheet of my own. We're actually only behind 303,841 to 256,536. Still that's about 1,500 words (or basically one day) per member of the team.
What's killing us is that Toronto has four writers over 20,000 already and we have one. Our 10,000+ people are even (13) and we only have one more 0 person than they do. So I guess I'm part of the problem as I'm still at 7,500 or so.
I'll have to remedy that tonight.
posted by incendiarymind at 10:33 AM
1 Comments:
Aw, thanks. :) I tend to think of myself more as ranting and rambling. Probably because I know people who are uber stats geeks in real life.
That's an interesting observation about masking erotic fiction as chick lit. I think it goes for all the other genres as well--not just chick lit. I guess you'll just have to look up the "All my filler will be pr0n" thread in the Reaching 50k forum to really understand. (I supported the "All my filler will have dead people" just to be contrary.)
The lit fic discussion reminded me of an incident not too long ago when I was browsing genre books at a used bookstore. Some trendy looking girls walked by and proclaimed loudly that genre fiction was "unhealthy"--which not so subtly implied that lit fic was healthy. Of course, knowing my disdain for literary pretensions, you can imagine how I felt about that remark.
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