This evening, I was doing some archiving of my journal in order to make sure that I had copies of everything locally. I also decided to write a script that would index my archive for better searching capabilities. In doing so, I exported all of my journals, by month to XML files, and then ran a wc -w *.xml on the resulting files. I was curious to see how many words I’d written in my journal this year. Here are the results, up to, but not including this entry:
Jan 23,503 Feb 20,731 Mar 16,587 Apr 25,476 May 19,481 Jun 12,321 Jul 23,941 Aug 25,917 Sep 27,164 Oct 29,976 Nov 7,770 232,867
To give you an idea, 20,000 words is roughly the equivalent of 100 manuscript pages. To give you a better idea, 233,000 words is just slightly shorter than John Steinbeck’s novel, East of Eden. It is roughly the length of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune. It is longer than The Grapes of Wrath and more than twice as long as Alice Sebold’s, The Lovely Bones. It is ten times as long as my 20,000 words novella, “Graveyard Shift”. It is a lot of writing.
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