3 Milestones for Writing and Blogging

I seem to be passing through a confluence of three milestones. That they have all come at roughly the same time is coincidence, but they are still worth mentioning.

1. I passed 400,000 words written on my consecutive day writing streak

With the writing I did last night, I have now passed 400,000 words written over the span of my (so far) 430 day consecutive writing streak.

Four hundred thousand words seems like an awful lot to me. But what I find more remarkable is that I don’t have a lot of time to write each day, and yet, the streak has helped pile up the words. Over 430 days, I’ve averaged about 930 words/day. If we assume that most professional full time writers try to get in 2,000 words/day, I’m nearly halfway there.

I didn’t start automating the tracking of my writing time until August, but if you look at the RescueTime data (the green chart) over the last 2 months, you can see that on my best day, I spent only 80 minutes at the keyboard. Indeed, over the course of the last 2 months, I’ve averaged 40 minutes of writing time per day.

2. I passed 500,000 words since starting my attempt to write every day

My 430 consecutive-day writing streak is part of a larger effort to write every day, which began in late February 2013. Since then, I’ve written for 573 out of the last 575 days. Put another way, I’ve only missed 2 days in the last 575 days. In all of that time, I’ve written 511,000 words. Half a million words is a pretty big milestone. It’s like an entire Stephen King or George R. R. Martin novel!

3. This blog has had about 1 million page views so far in 2014

I’m jumping the gun slightly on this one. More than likely, the blog will actually hit 1 million tomorrow evening or Saturday, but I have a busy weekend coming up and wasn’t sure I’d have time to note it.

It’s kind of hard to believe that I’ve managed a million page views over the space of 9 months. It means I should end up with around 1.3 million by the end of the year. Things slowed down a bit in September, possibly because I haven’t had time to post as much. Still, it’s pretty amazing. I can remember back in 2011 when I was hoping to triple the page views from about 30/day to 90/day. And here I am averaging somewhere between 3,000 – 4,000/day.

Here is how the traffic has evolved since January 2011:

Anyway, those three milestones all happened (or will happen) in the last few days. Pretty cool, eh?