Thursday, January 23, 2020

Writing Stats For 2019

Written by Kodi Wolf at 11:27 AM

2019 was slightly insane.

After my wife and I bought our first house at the end of 2018, we ended up doing more renovations than we'd initially planned on, which took a lot of my time and energy away from my writing, but I still managed to maintain my daily writing schedule and I even surpassed my basic goal of writing 500 words per day.

Here are my stats for 2019.

Compared to last year, my total dropped by about 49,000 words, which is a lot, but given that my total time spent writing dropped by about 127 hours, the loss is actually kind of low (at 707 words per hour, it should've been closer to 90,000 words less). But just like last year, my average words per hour increased, so I seem to be getting faster. I don't know if I'm just typing faster or I'm figuring stuff out faster, but I'm happy about it either way.

I also managed to post almost 50,000 words, just like I did in 2018, so it took less words to get to the same amount of postable content.

I only had three basic goals for my writing in 2019, mostly due to knowing I would be splitting my time between renovating the new house and writing. The first two were the bare minimum I wanted to achieve for the year, while the last one was mostly me being hopeful.

• I wanted to maintain a daily average of at least 500 words. (Done - see above)
• I wanted to keep my streak going and write every day. (Done - 1,476 days, including today)
• I wanted to post new story chapters. (Done - posted almost 48,000 words on A Bondage Primer)

Considering all the craziness of my health issues and trying to renovate a house, I think I did pretty well keeping up with my writing.

Now, for 2020.

I kind of feel like even though I got a lot of writing done in 2019, I didn't get much finished (or at least not as much as I wanted to). So, that's my overall goal for 2020. To take my outlines and notes and turn them into finished scenes and chapters. To help me achieve that goal, I've realized I need to shift my focus away from my word count. I don't need new words, I need edited words.

On the other hand, maintaining my daily writing streak is really important to me. I feel like if I let that slide, I'll just go back to allowing days of not writing to turn into weeks, and then months.

So, I've come up with a dual daily practice I'm going to try to implement and see if it works.

For at least 15 minutes every day, I'm going to work on one of my outlined scenes to turn it into story text. If I want to continue beyond that, I certainly can, and if it sparks me to write new text, that's fine, too, but if my energy is low, I don't have to push it.

When I'm done, I'm not going to try to keep track of what I've deleted or count the new words interspersed in the previously outlined text. I'm just going to count the words for the part of the scene that I completed and that will be my word count for the day. This will push me to get bits finalized without being so focused on my word count that I feel compelled to come up with something new in order to meet a specific word count goal. I do kind of think it's a cheat, but whatever gets me to my goal, you know? :)

For another 15 minutes every day, I'm going to work on more admin type stuff. These are the things that are connected to my writing, but don't actually involve writing story text. Like copying my stories from Word into Scrivener so I can make Kindle mobi files. Or editing the code on the 200+ pages of my website to implement the site redesign I came up with last year to make the site more mobile friendly (and in the process, hopefully, more search engine friendly). Or organizing my brainstorming session notes that are in Scrivener and moving them to the appropriate sections of my scene outlines so it'll be easier for me to write those scenes when I get there.

I know I came up with some of this last year, but I found it very difficult to let go of my word count. I think part of that was because I was stressed from having to put most of my energy into the house renovations, so by the time I would get around to writing, it was easier to just fall back on my usual habit of brainstorming a new sex scene for A Bondage Primer (I have 201 days to fill and they almost never stop at one orgasm, so that's a lot of sex scenes to imagine... Damn, I love my job... Anyway... :) )

I've also realized I've been letting a lot of admin stuff fall by the wayside as well. I really want all of my stories to be available in various ebook formats, but it isn't as simple as 'Saving as...' from my Word files. It takes time to transfer that text into Scrivener and make all the formatting adjustments, and if I feel like I only have enough energy to do one thing, I'm going to choose writing over formatting every time.

But if I can put just 15 minutes a day towards getting some of those admin tasks done, I might actually get some of those tasks completed and off my plate by the end of the year, which would be nice.

Well, wish me luck. :)