Hard to believe it is already July. Half the year is over and that means I have writing data for the first half of 2014. Here is what the first half of the year looked like:
In case it isn’t clear, the blue bars represent each day’s worth of writing (word count). The yellow line is the goal I set for myself to try to reach each day. It is secondary to getting any actual writing done, but I find it useful to have. The red line is the most useful when looking at trends. It represents the 7-day moving average word count. You can see that the first 3 months or so were kind of spiky, moving up and down around the goal, but beginning in April, when I started in earnest on the second draft of the novel, things picked up. Indeed, since mid-April, I haven’t written less than 500 words on a given day, the longest span I’ve gone doing that. Further, you can see that the 7-day moving average has not only exceeded my daily goal, but has been more than twice that goal for the better part of the last three months.
I thought it would be interesting to compare the first six months of 2014 with the first six months of 2013. I didn’t start my daily writing regimen until late February 2013, so there is some data missing early on. But here are the two years compared:
The red is 2013 and the blue is this year. You can see that since about May 2014, I’ve been regularly outstripping that same period last year.
In the first 6 months of 2013 (including the 2 months before I started my daily writing) I wrote just under 100,000 words. In the first 6 months of 2014, I’ve written 163,000 words. While I have also tracked my writing time using Rescue Time, I haven’t parsed that data in any detail. That said, I have worked out a model for estimating time from words written. 163,000 words comes out to about 109 hours spent writing in the first 6 months of the year. That’s 4.5 days worth of writing. Not very much in the grand scheme of things, but then again, with the full time job and two little kids, my time is fairly limited. It averages to about 906 words per day, or roughly 35 minutes per day of writing.
I have only a few deliverables to show for all of this writing so far: a couple of nonfiction articles. Otherwise, the writing has been working toward two projects: the second draft of my novel, and a novella that I’ve been working on intermittently when I need a break from the novel. So my published words in 2014 is a tiny fraction of what I’ve written. But I expect that to change as the second half of the year unfolds.
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