NaNoWriMo: Day 2

Work continues on The Making of Magic, although I believe a fossilized snail would overtake me on the first turn.  I've finished the scenes and dialogue that explain Otheldo's home during his childhood, and set up the first series of obstacles which Our Hero must overcome somehow. 

My word count thus far is 11,881, according to Micro$oft Word 2002 SP 3.  I originally wrote using LibreOffice, which claims to produce Word documents in exactly the same format as MS Word — except it doesn't.  I discovered this little white lie when I tried to feed my completed anthology from a LibreOffice DOC file into the Amazon translator, which if everything went correctly would return a file compatible with the Kindle e-reader.  The translator coughed, appeared to lock up, then produced a host of cryptic error messages having to do with the fact that it expected an MS DOC file and instead got gibberish.

Motivated by frustration and curiosity,  I created an identical three page file in Word and LibreOffice, then opened both in a file compare utility.  There were a few similarities, but you had to hunt for them.  In particular, the Word file featured a header that could only be interpreted by someone who was an HTML guru with 20 years of hard experience under his hands.  Suffice to say, it was three miles above my pay grade.

So I set my sights on an antique copy of Word, got it for a bargain, and continue using it to this day.  Eventually I expect Amazon to demand a DOCX file format, but until then I'm getting along just fine, thanks.

Back to work I go.