Tag: Writing Statistics

Writing Journal 2.16.2022: Not the best of numbers, but some clarity on my pace… and a bit more consistency… plus some other news

Welcome again.

Although it doesn’t look like it, I have been getting some blog writing done behind the scenes, yet not published yet. However, I’ve been making more progress. There’s at least three posts that I’m working on in drafts, and they are getting closer to getting done. I had wanted to get them done earlier, but I’ve been busy with a little passion project that I finally got finished up. (That’s the subject of one of those draft blogs. Maybe Friday I’ll post it?)

So, this week. I got more than a little writing done, pretty consistently across the week. The weekend wasn’t total garbage, even though I only wrote 55 words one day. At least it wasn’t zero, right?

I’m also looking to make some adjustments to the number of words I need to shoot for every day. I mentioned previously my goal for the year is 200,000 words in a year, roughly 16,667 words a month on average. I was a little below that monthly average last January, but I’m hoping to make up the difference over the next two months, especially since March is going to be a slightly “longer” month than the others.

Usually, my goal is to get to around 500 words per day. However, I have done some recalculations and realized that if I am going to make this 200,000 word goal with some words to spare, I am going to have to get closer to around 600 words per day.

That’s not a problem. One of the good things about setting a writing goal in advance and working toward it is spot checking how much you are getting done as the year progresses. I can check those stats and see if I have to make adjustments to daily or weekly totals if I get ahead or behind. Now that I have that goal ahead of time, I’m finding it to be a little easier to see where I am relative to that goal and how much I have to do to get there.

Visualization and goal-setting… seems to be working? We’ll have a better idea after a couple of months, likely.

How am I going to get those numbers up? Well, I have a blog about writing, maybe I need to… write a little more than just once a month about how much I’m writing? (Man, talk about insider baseball.) I need to get a little further into the self-publishing area, especially with this book project I’ve had sitting on the sidelines. I want to get more into Canva for design and Substack for writing – it might be a way that I can get paid for writing directly than what is going on now. But I’m also staying here on WordPress because I consider it to be a very intuitive site and not something that I need a lot of programming skill or cash to keep going.

As for last week’s numbers… they were both good and bad. For the first time in a long time, I managed to write at least something every day. Yeah, I did wind up just writing 55 words on one of those days, but I managed to make my minimum daily quota of 500 words.

(Now, however, I know I’ll have to lay on a few extra words every day to get to 200K. Again, not a problem now since I know how much I need to still write.)

Also, I managed to meet that minimum quota of either 500 words a day or 30 minutes of revisions or planning for writing a day every day last week, which isn’t a nothing statistic. After just meeting my daily quotas just 58 percent of the time, I’m going to be gunning for meeting daily quota at least 70 percent of the time. So, an entire week when I match my daily quota one way or another is going to be a big win in my book.

So, here are the weekly stats. And, it turns out all this is a bit over 600 words. Another good day of writing for me, at least.

Writers keep writing and everyone keep safe.

Writing statistics for the week ending 2.12.2022:
+3,425 words written.
Days writing: 7 of 7.
Days revising/planning: 2 of 7 for 60 total minutes.
Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of planning/revisions): 7 of 7 days.

Writing Journal 2/2/2022: The end of the month brings better numbers… but not so better numbers for an entire month… thanks to a bit of a miscalculation… but I’m not that far behind my goal

Hi, everyone.

I had a bit of a slowdown the past couple days due to a good-sized cold – not COVID, this is acting exactly like my typical colds this time of the year. A runny nose is turning into a cough after a few days, right on time, and so I’ll likely have to deal with a cough for the next week or two. Thankfully, my mask wearing at work seems to have been paying off to avoid COVID there (and help prevent spreading my cold to anyone else, a plus).

I actually had a good week of writing last week – the best I had last month.

However, I kind of miscalculated my pace to match my goal for this month.

I had calculated that I had to hit about 3,850 per week to hit my goal, but I realized all of a sudden that I calculated for a five-week month rather than a four week month. So, I ended up dropping below my goal… but not terribly.

My stats for the month of January:
Words: 13,954
Revise/Plan: 165 minutes
Daily Writing Goals Met: 68%

So, about 2,000 words behind my intended pace of 16,667 words per month to reach my yearly goal of 200,000 that I set. Not horrific… and definitely something that I can make up with time, especially now that I know which months are “longer” months and what I have to play with. Also, I’m only two percentage points off my goal of meeting my daily goals 70 percent of the time this year (500 words per day minimum or at least 30 minutes per day revising/planning projects).

I’m this close to getting the main fan fiction project that I’ve been tooling around on for the past year or two done and dusted. Even though there are a few side stories in what I’m now calling a series, I’m not going to feel so time sensitive to getting that work done. Once I get that out of the way, I think that I will be able to devote more time with this blog. I actually did some writing on another blog post that I’ve wanted to get out for a while, so I felt good about that even though I still haven’t finished with it.

Anyway, here’s the weekly totals. Hope your week is going well and stay safe.

Weekly statistics for the week ending 1.30.2022:
+4,398 words written.
Days writing: 6 of 7.
Days revising/planning: 1 of 7 for  60 total minutes.
Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of planning/revisions): 6 of 7 days.

[PHOTO NOTE; The featured photo for today came up when I did a search for calculation, heh heh.]

Writing Statistics for 2019 in review

So, I wound up doing this last year around this time and it was interesting to see those numbers. I also did a first half of the year review back this summer, so I’ll likely review my activity for the second half of the year, the year in it’s entirety, and maybe try and do some comparisons to the last couple of years that I was using similar stats to see if there are any changes.

Second half of 2019:

  • Jul:
    • Words: 3,465
    • Revise/Plan: 1,650
    • DWGM: 80%
  • Aug:
    • Words: 5,258
    • Revise/Plan: 1,290
    • DWGM: 82%
  • Sep:
    • Words: 38,711
    • Revise/Plan: 180
    • DWGM: 100%
  • Oct:
    • Words: 29,405
    • Revise/Plan: 1,260
    • DWGM: 94%
  • Nov:
    • Words: 10,474
    • Revise/Plan: 480
    • DWGM: 94%
  • Dec:
    • Words: 29,530
    • Revise/Plan: 510
    • DWGM: 79%
  • 2nd:
    • Words (total): 117,843
    • Words (avg.): 19,641
    • Revise/Plan (total): 5,370
    • Revise/Plan (avg.) 895
    • DWGM (avg.): 88%

And, the stats from 2019 as a whole:

  • 2019:
    • Words (total): 193,881
    • Words (avg.) 16,157
    • Revise/Plan (total): 8,865
    • Revise/Plan (avg.): 739
    • DWGM (avg.): 78%

So, how does this compare to the totals I saw the past couple of years? It’s definitely an improvement over last year, which was the first year that I used this format to track my progress.

  • 2018:
    • Words (total): 53,878
    • Words (avg.): 4,490
    • Revisions (total): 8,955
    • Revisions (avg.): 746
    • DWGM (avg.): 52%

As you can see, I did a much better job at reaching my writing quotas than last year. I wrote more words overall (even though a good portion of that is fan fiction, it’s still fiction, folks), only had a slight drop in revisions and planning, but, again, I made my quotas on a much more consistent basis than before.

 

So, I felt good about how my work output grew since the beginning of 2018. I might actually start developing some consistency if I don’t look out. 🙂

 

We’ll see how 2020 goes.