If you have crossed 50,000 words, you can now validate your win by letting the magical word counting monkeys compute the total number of words in your novel. For your efforts, you'll receive the beautiful purple winner bar and access to the secret winner page with certificate and icons. The validation feature will be available until the last minute of November, but take advantage of it as soon as you can, because the site is likely to be slammed with would-be validators on the last day, leading to great slowness and gnashing of teeth.
Here's how to validate:
1. Go to "Edit Profile", the same place that you've been updating your word count.
2. Look for the "Word Count Validator" box. If you've been updating your word count by pasting in your whole text rather than typing in the number manually, this box is already your old friend.
3. Copy the entire text of your novel by going to your novel file and highlighting everything with select-all. Save before you do this! Don't type something else while you have everything selected! Be careful! Don't Panic!
4. Go back to the friendly "Word Count Validator" box and paste in the entire text of your novel.
5. Scroll to the bottom of the page and hit the "Submit" button.
The monkeys will now get to work, and if they count more than 50,000 words, you'll be taken to the wonderful "You've Won!" page. If your count is only just over 50k by your word processor's count, the monkeys may not agree you've won, because word-counting programs can have discrepancies of up to a few hundred words. So try to be a little bit past 50k before you go to validate, and if you end up under, Don't Panic! Go back to your file and type a few paragraphs venting your frustration with the validation progress, then try again.
You can continue to update your word count as often as you like until the end of the month, so once you've hit 50k, there is no reason to delay in validating and claiming your winner bar. Validate early, validate... well, until it takes.
IMPORTANT IMPORTANT IMPORTANT! If you're going to be performing a death-defying feat of last-minute noveling, make sure your time zone is set correctly in your profile so that you and the site will agree about when 11:59pm on November 30 occurs. Because daylight savings time ended before November began, you may need to adjust your time zone even if you set it correctly before. Go to "Edit Profile" and then "Account settings". Under "Time zone", make sure the drop down menu is displaying the current time, and change it if it's not, then Submit to save the settings if you make a change. For California, the correct time zone is "-0800".
Questions about any of this? Ask away -- and don't wait until the evening of November 30 to do it!
%) Lisa
South Bay co-ML
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