A Fun Little Statistic for You
Posted on December 30, 2006 Posted by John Scalzi 11 Comments
Not counting this entry or anything I write tomorrow, I’ve posted about 300,000 words to the Whatever in 2006, which comes out to about 825 words a day, every day. Add to that what I expect is an additional 200,000 words or so I wrote over at By The Way, and that’s roughly half a million words I’ve written online this year. Which is, you know, a lot.
But wait! There’s more! Add to this 92,000 words for The Last Colony, 12,700 for “The Sagan Diary,” 7,500 for “How I Proposed to My Wife: An Alien Sex Story,” about 10,000 for reviews/columns for OPM, 25,000 in DVD reviews for the Dayton Daily News, and another 10,000 for various newspaper/magazine articles, and you come up with a bit over 650,000 words written by yours truly over the course of the year, or about 1,785 words a day, every day.
Which puts it in perspective. 650K words seems like a lot — that’s six novels and a YA — but 1.8k a day? I can do that. And, uh, apparently I did.
OK, if that is not enough to keep you busy in addition to taping bacon to a cat, try the following:
http://thrillingwonder.blogspot.com/2006/12/cat-owner-tips-tricks.html
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!
You can read my thoughts about it here. =)
I think it’s a lot more impressive that those are editted words, not just raw words. I don’t know about you, but I tend to write and not use a whole ton more words than what actually ends up in the final version of something.
Think I just read that Kerouac wrote 6000 words a day. Guess that makes you a slacker.
Damn Kerouac and his lousy Protestant work ethic!
Yeah, but you don’t see Kerouac being compared to Heinlein either.
Hmm, let me see, with current (magazine) publication payments per word, uh huh, carry the 2, compensate for the rotational axis while doing said work, Mercury was in retrograde all through the fall, and that comes to a grand total (if you had simply put all that effort into short story/novella work for paid publication) of $1,250. Congrats. :)
Glad it was a good year for you, John. I look forward to reading your output next year.
You forgot the 1.5 million words written in the comments section…..
Well, I didn’t write all of those.
You aren’t writing me? Damn. Who is?
Ah, but did you count the ones you did?
You’d be logorehic if you weren’t so dammed interesting.
Cheers in 08.
–ml