It’s time for my annual attempt to count up every single word of fiction I wrote over the course of 365 days. This was a hard year to quantify, because I did a lot of revising/polishing/burning to the ground and rebuilding from the ashes of projects I put aside in 2014, and I didn’t keep a completely accurate tally of how many new words I added to old manuscripts. I also had more side projects, which I picked up and put down whenever I felt like it.
This year was also a rough one for me personally, and I had to come to terms with the fact that there were times when I was tired and stressed and pushing myself to write more fiction would lead to burnout. I also got a new job (awesome!) with a huge writing component (super awesome!) but didn’t include those words in my count.
Total Word Count, 2015
Not bad, considering! I wasn’t quite as productive on paper as I was in 2014, but I moved several manuscripts closer to an actually readable state.
Words per week, 2015
Ok, here’s the part where I should have kept better track of what I was doing. I worked on five distinct projects in 2015, but only recorded weekly word counts for one set of revisions and one new novel. Some of the weeks when my word count appears to fall to zero are weeks when I actually didn’t do any writing, but others were weeks when I was working on something I didn’t track.
Total Word Count by Project, 2015
Again, I only tracked the revisions and the novel. They both have roughly the pattern I like to see progress-wise (a nice rising slope without too many plateaus).
So, what’s next for 2016? A whole lot more words on the page, but more importantly, at least one draft in finished form. I’d like to begin serializing the novel here some time in.