Pointless Statistics

I had to do a radio interview yesterday about the library's summer reading program. This is not the most horrible of things, but it does make me a little nervous. So the night before I couldn’t write during my writing time. After a couple of failed attempts to get going I ended up going through some of my published pieces.

Then for some reason I decided to see how many words I have written. Of course quality is much more important than quantity, but I was really just trying to find something to distract myself. But now I have this big pile of meaningless numbers. Today I decided to post these on this blog in a half hearted attempt to convince myself it wasn’t just a half hour of wasted time coming up with them.

Since 2009 I have written 123,000 words in short fiction, 350,000 words in finished novels, and 127,000 words in novels that are still in progress (there are four of them partially done). For a grand total of 600,000 words or an average of 482 words/day.

Hmmm…that’s something huh…well that means um…just a sec let me use my google-fu(takes break to google writing/ words count/ etc. in an attempt to find a reason why he did this pointless research) (takes another break to eat a sandwich: ham, cheese, mustard, and pickle on wheat)

Apparently Stephen King says that the first million words you write are just practice. That means I am 60% done with my “practice writing” so by that standard it should just take me a few more years to be a good writer.