It's very frustrating to me that there's such a glaring flaw in my writing program of choice, OpenOffice.org Writer, but it's unfortunately a reality that I discovered today after reading on NaNoWriMo about how it does a terrible job at counting words properly.

The problem lies in how the program counts smart quotes (curly quotes, sexed quotes, etc.) Basically, those are the fancier quotes that contain dialogue. There is a bug that's been around for a long time in OOo Writer that counts the beginning curly quote as a word. Presumably single quotes and apostrophes suffer from a similar problem.

What this means is that I'm only at about 48,600~ words now rather than the 50,040. I was expecting somewhat of a discrepancy, but that's really ridiculous and infuriating knowing how much I've relied on a word count figure to keep me updated on my progress, only to find out that, due to some stupid error in counting that's apparently been around for ages, all of the tracking and word counting I've done have gone completely out the window as far as accuracy goes.

It's like an artist finding out that his or her ink fades after only three weeks rather than three or four years like they may have thought, leading to a gross distortion of the very art you created.

Now, granted, it doesn't actually affect any of my stories at all. It's not like it should make that much of a difference, and, chances are, there is only a 2% to 3% inflation on any of the stories I've written (which sadly means I didn't technically break 30,000 for the first 6 months). The stories are still there and still pretty good, but it's just sad for me because it means I have to reevaluate everything when it comes to getting a more accurate count.

One option would be to use OOo Writer but use only flat, single "quotes." These are definitely the most compatible and they are the quotes you use on your keyboard without any special instruction, but it just looks more professional using the curly ones. I could also use another program, which is probably what I will end up doing, but I'd need to make sure it doesn't suffer from a similar problem and can also automatically insert the special quotes that I like. Finally, there's the option of writing everything on Google Docs, which does offer pretty accurate word counting and does have support for the curly quotes I want, but I'm always nervous writing things solely online (yeah, I can make backups) and there's a slim chance Google may think I'm violating their Terms of Service since I'm writing about "animals" "doing things." I wouldn't want to be promoting sex with animals by posting Trainer on Pokemon stories, now, would I? =/ Then they could potentially shut me down which would suck because that's where I keep all of my e-mail. Although the ability for people to view it while I'm writing it or for proofreaders or betas to fix things collaboratively could be kind of neat.

Eh, I don't know, I'm just kind of a little upset about that, and rather than spending the evening writing the words to recoup my losses, I'm going on here to complain about it, lol. Oh the irony, right? Ah well.

If you're outraged by this as well, I urge you to look into another alternative all the same until this error is sorted out. There are only a billion editors out there (I use Ubuntu instead of Windows or Mac, though, so my options are different), so I'm sure there's probably a better one I could use instead.

Okay, now I'm gonna try get to work, once I can get past this little blip of writer's block I've been suffering from today. :x