random stats for a Friday night

[swan_tower]

There’s a certain margin of error in this, because the word counts I record are for final drafts (when I remember to go back and update them from the original number), and sometimes final drafts don’t happen in the same calendar year as first drafts. But I just crunched the numbers, and while last year was my worst for short fiction* since I started actually writing short fiction — only 7700 words in two stories, one of which is a Bad Draft that needs a complete rewrite — it was my best year for total wordcount since 2001 . . . which was, not coincidentally, the last time I wrote two novels in one year. (I also wrote ten short stories that year. It was not long after I figured out how to write them, and I was on a roll.)

I like crunching these numbers occasionally because it puts things in perspective. My default tendency would be to mope and castigate myself for not writing more short stories in 2014; ergo, it is useful to be able to look at the number 192,700 and tell myself that no, actually, that was a pretty good year. I will never be one of those people who cranks out half a million words a year: trying would kill both my hands and my brain. But that’s two full-length novels and some short fiction. It ain’t bad.

. . . of course, it also makes me ambitious to top both of those metrics this year. I’ve already written two pieces of short fiction, so it’ll only take one more to cross that threshold. And with one of those “short” pieces being a novella, and a novel already under my belt with another one planned for this summer, I might actually make it. Depends on how long this second novel turns out to be . . . .

*not counting fanfiction

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

Very nice!

[dionne obeso (from livejournal.com)]

I don't go back and edit word counts based on edited lengths, but I do keep a daily tally of all the fiction words I write (no fanfic, no blogging or Tweeting, no non-fiction even for publication). The last few years have been pitiful because of health issues, but this year I'm at 30K and feeling proud to be reclaiming something I love. It's always awesome to see and compare with other writers. Some turn out ridiculous wordcounts (I know a writer who broke a million at least once, and most of it has been published; she's good, she's fast, and she has NO other hobbies), others are steady as a train... pretty much all of it is encouraging.

Re: Very nice!

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I've never been in the habit of recording daily counts, except (sometimes) when working on a novel. So I don't actually know how much I write in a given year; all I have a record of is the total wordcount of works completed in that year, some of which may have been started in a previous year (or longer ago than that...). So quite a bit of margin of error here. :-)

Congrats on getting back into the saddle! You're right that it varies wildly from person to person; so long as you don't fall into the trap of thinking one of those approaches is the "right" one, seeing the differences can be fascinating.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's such useful perspective, because sometimes it's very hard not to treat writing as all one thing, when in fact it's all interrelated things instead.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I've made posts like this before, for exactly that reason. I need to remember there are different ways to view this, and they tell me different things.