I wrote every day in 2014: Here’s an #infographic

As of today, my writing streak stands at 528 consecutive days. The overall number are 671 out of the last 673 days, but I have written every day since July 21, 2014. I began this back in late February of 2013, and since today is the last day of 2014, it means that I have now written every single day in 2014. I put together an infographic to illustrate what this looks like:

The infographic show my writing by day for each week in 2014. It is color coded as a heat map, with “cooler” colors representing low word count days, and “warmer” colors representing higher word count days. The totals are the totals for each week, which are color coded in proportion to the total of the days of the week.

From this, you can see that I wrote a total of 311,354 words in 2014. That is fiction and nonfiction and does not count blogging. If you want to include the blogging I’ve done here, you must add 233,788 words to that. Fiction/nonfiction plus blogging totaled 545,142 words in 2014.

The infographic allows me to easily spot trends in my writing. For instance, I had a fairly cool period in weeks 5-10, followed by a fairly hot period weeks 18-27. Cool again weeks 40-44, and then back to warm weeks 47-51.

It also gives an interesting look at my writing on each day of the week. The totals at the bottom are averages per day for that weekday. On average, I wrote 934 words/day on Monday, my most productive day of the week. Contrast that to Wednesdays, where I averaged 760 words/day.

I try to write at least 500 words each day, but if I don’t hit 500 I don’t sweat it. Circumstances are sometimes out of my control. Still, I’m pleased that I managed to write every day this year. If I had managed to write exactly 500 words every day, that would have been a total of  182,500 words. That I wrote nearly twice that amount (well, 1.7 times that amount) makes me happy. It also helps set a baseline for next year.

My only real goal for 2015 is to keep up the streak. I’d like to finish the second draft of the novel as part of that streak, but I’ll take what I can get.