Why Can't I Just Have A Normal Life???

You know what that means. It's time for another sort-of-true story about life (but this one happens to be totally true without any embellishment)

So, you guys are probably aware of my contest and publication craze that I did last month (you can read a little bit of my opinions on it here.) This month I thought I had it easy. One CWG assignment, an easy RTF assignment, some fun KOF assignments and one contest. Well, that contest was just about the death of me.

I submitted it today. Yesterday, I was finishing up my denouement (closing) scene. Now, my denouement is usually highly significant, highly emotion-packed and my favorite one to write. So I check my word count to see how long I could make it.

The short story was supposed to be 1200 words (insert one of Catey's loudest high-pitched screams). I had used up 1147 of them. Yikes. That's a really bad situation.

About three seconds away from a heart attack, I checked the website to make sure it was 1200 words. I was quite relieved to find that it was actually 1500 words, buying me an extra 300.

Still, 300 words???? What kind of short story is this???

So, after using all but twenty of my 300 words to tie up my story (which I was NOT enjoying and didn't even sound good to me) I started to read over for spelling/punctuation errors.

And that's when I realized it. Why was this section here? I had moved that scene to be the second scene, instead of the opening. What was going on? I read down the document - realized I had forgotten to delete the scene once I moved it.

I now had 415 extra words.

And I wasn't about to let them go to waste!!! I promptly went back into my document and inserted my 415 extra words, reread and...

Realized that I was now 60 words over count. How do I ALWAYS manage to do that??

Want to know my final word count? 1499 words.