I tend to work on my novel in segments. It's easier because I'll give chunks to one of my writer's groups or my mentor at my MFA program to critique. Then I paste the segment into the master document.
This week I did that again with a 34-page excerpt, after my mentor attached her comments to it. Prior to that, my master document was 325 pages. Once I added the new segment to the whole, I checked the page length.
It was 377 pages.
I don't know what New Math Microsoft used, but I've never known 325 + 34 to equal 377. I can see 360, because it may overlap into another page. But there's no way this excerpt was 53 pages (my mentor would kill me).
It turns out somehow, in pasting the new segment in, I fucked up the formatting. I don't know exactly what I did. But with one more packet left to complete the novel, I'm trying hard to keep this manuscript under 400 pages. I couldn't seem to fix the formatting. So I copied the entire novel and pasted it into a new document, just to see how that would affect poage length.
This time, when I pasted it, the novel was 345 pages. Obviously that's better. And the formatting in the new document looks normal. But I also don't know how 325 + 34 = 345.
What the fuck, MS Word?
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