My Writing Stats and a New Article on Divine.



 

Writing Stats.

Like many men, I am fascinated by statistics. One of the ways I display this fascination is by keeping a record of the number of words I write each day. This record includes both fiction writing and the writing of articles for the Divine website.

Recently I checked my word count record and found I had written at least 10 words on each of the last 366 days. So I have fulfilled the Norman Mailer quote stuck to the bottom of my computer monitor that says “a real writer produces work even on bad days.”

I totalled up the number of words for the past year and it came to 128,000, which is 349 words a day. Now if only it was a1000 words a day, then I might get somewhere.

Oh, and I have just clicked over the 100,000 words on the novel I am writing.

Adventures in Dentistry.

This week I had my 23rd article posted on the Divine website. The article is about my adventures using the public dental system. It contains a few numbers like 6090, which is the number of dollars quoted by my dentist to fix my teeth.

I left out a few numbers from the article like on Monday I will be heading down to Melbourne for the 16th time to see a dentist since April last year. It will be my 26th dentist appointment in that time.

Word Counts in Ebooks.

I do wish the people who format anthologies into ebooks shared my enthusiasm for numbers. Then they could include a word count under the title of each story in the anthology to let me know how long the story is. Ebook anthologies don’t have page numbers in their tables of contents (at least the ones I checked didn’t). So the only way of knowing the length of a story is to laboriously click through each page until the end. I want an easier way to figure out whether I have time to read a story.

Those of you who trawl through my longer blog posts will probably be very happy that this one is a brief 361 words.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review of Jonathan Franzen's Purity.

Image
Although this blog is mainly about science fiction, I sometimes read pure literature just to see what the other side is up. Jonathon Franzen is one of my favourite non-genre authors and here is a review of Purity, which I just finished reading.   Purity is literature with a plot. The plot revolves around secrets with the two main secrets being Purity’s search for the identity of her father, and the cover-up of a murder. The novel follows four main characters: Purity, Andreas Wolf, Tom and Leila. Purity is a recent university graduate in search of journalism job. She was raised by a controlling, but loving, mother who always got her own way and would argue for hours about the most trivial matters. Andreas Wolf is modelled on Julian Assange, complete with his own version of Wikileaks. Wolf was raised in East Germany and was a reluctant escapee when the wall came down as East Germany was a seemingly perfect place to keep his secrets. Tom is the owner and editor of an invest...
Read more

Review of The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, by Richard Flanagan

Image
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is about a dying mother, Francie, and the efforts of her adult children to keep her alive, even though she wants to die. The children have lost the ability to communicate with each other, and are out to show they have the power, at least in the case of Anna and Terzo, to keep their mother alive. While Tommy, a failed artist who was looking after Francie, just acquiesces to the will of his other two siblings.  The novel is also about our dying planet, particularly from climate change, as animals go extinct We say we care, but do little to prevent the unfolding disaster. The novel is set in Tasmania while bushfires rage throughout that state and the rest of Australia.  Anna is the main protaganist, a successful architect, who rather than face her mother's pain, her crap relationship with her son, or the raging climate around her, retreats into social media. Frequently forwarding articles she has not read to her friends, showing how she avoids taki...
Read more

New Blog Look.

I have just updated the look of my blog. I am trying to create a consistent web presence online by ensuring that my blog, website and social media look the same and are connected.  This desire for a consistent web presence is a result of what I have learnt in my studies for a Bachelor or Arts (Internet Communications). I have just completed the first two subjects. One of the subjects, Web Communications, had us creating a new web presence, so I created a new blog on Wix, a new Facebook page, a new Twitter account, and joined Wattpad for the first time. As part of the assignment we were supposed to consistently style all the sites. The central node is here . The other subject was an Introduction to Internet Design. In that subject we had to create, from html and CSS code, a website. I choose to do one for author Graham Clements. For that website, I pretended that I had published four novels that are in reality only unpublished, and in need of redrafting, manuscripts. I am quite ...
Read more