Format

Notepad.

The only thing the word counter recognizes is a single large Notepad (.TXT) file.

when you use the counter, it simply pulls up the .TXT file and scans it counting the words. If you have a low speed connection, this can take a while (I'm on a 56K line so it took a few minutes).

so, no, you don't write chapters as separate files.

You don't write chapters as word or word perfect or whatever documents.

You don't double space, you don't even need to indent the paragraphs (other than for yourself), you don't put in page headings or footings. Italics, bold, underline are all meaningless and cost you key strokes while giving you nothing in return.

You do absolutely none of the stuff that they tell you to do if you're planning on submitting to a publisher or an agent. All that comes later.

Other suggestions:

No contractions. Wasn't is one word, was not is two words. Last year I scanned my document for common contractions (He'll,she'll, we'll, they'll, can't, won't shouldn't, couldn't - you get the idea) and replaced them with the two words version. Added nearly a thousand words to my word count with that.

If a character has a title, they are always referred to by that title.

Detective Seargent Davis is never just Davis, or Detective or Sergenat, he is always Detective Seargent Davis.

This isn't about pretty formating, it is solely about getting words from your head into your computer.

I write my novel as separate chapters in Word Perfect. I create a "master" document which includes all the chapters written and when you open a master document, it opens all the separate documents and voila! you have ONE document. THEN save that one document as a TXT document and the counter works with it.

If you're using Word or Word Perfect, do a quick learn on Master and SubDocuments so you know what you're doing. I certainly don't want you to lose anything and that can happen if you don't know what you're doing.

G'luck.

So, if you're working on an existing piece in one big Word document, then to upload to the site and get the correct word count, you can just save your new stuff into a txt file and upload that and thereby you are not cheating? woo hoo!

Ayep; as long as the only words you submit are the words you wrote between Nov 1 and Nov 31, it isn't cheating.

Heh, I'll most likely be doing most of my writing by emailing stuff to myself during work. (It's not losing time working; I get lunch and breaks and can work then!)

Two years ago I just spent about half an hour (after I finished writing) copying and pasting everything into one long document and then converting it to .txt format. It was easier than typing them all into one file; if I needed to skip a chapter or look something up, then I only had 5000 words to look through, rather than 50,000. (I guess I could have discovered bookmarks but it was the simplest possible method at the time, and one I at least knew a good deal about.)

I'd remember not to paste a chapter twice, though. That's definitely cheating.

The good thing about WordPad/gedit/whatever text editor you're using is that it takes a fraction of the time to load, vs. MS/OpenOffice Word or WP.

This "just write" thing is going to be the death of me. I'm a compulsive editor!