OK, so I don’t have any lies to tell. I do, however, have some very interesting statistics about my personal writing. I just spent the last few days converting ever bit of my writing from the last 9.5 years that I have available in digital format to PageFour software for writers.
It took for freaking ever, it seemed. I had no idea I’d written so much! So when I finished porting all the writing and notes into PageFour, I decided to figure up just how much I had actually written.
These counts do not reflect academic, blog, or journal writing, poetry, pre-writing notes, first drafts of already edited manuscripts, deleted scenes from finished projects, the original starts for things I scrapped and started over (several of those), handwritten stories, etc.. It’s just the words I currently have on all of the projects I’ve written.
Since June of 2001, I have written 487,000 words across a total of 38 projects. 16 novels, 12 non-fiction essay/articles, and 10 short stories. I have completed 3 novels, 8 articles and essays, and 4 shorts. I have sold three articles and submitted one novel for agent review.
Several things surprised me here. For starters, I didn’t realize just how prolific I was in the early 2000’s. In the last three years, I have started only two new novel projects and 1 new short story. Most of my attention has been devoted to completing and perfecting Hunters. Â Secondly, I had no idea at all that I was completing about 40% of the projects I started. I tend to angst a bit about things left unfinished, and my growing list of projects that I just can’t admit are dead weighs on me sometimes. Seeing that simple percentage has taken a lot of the weight off, honestly.
Statistics have their uses, I suppose. Glad I’ve found mine.
