A Statistical Look Back at the First Half of 2023

Or, how my obsession with word count and other writing data seems to be paying off

Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash

I don’t talk much about the gritty details of my writing data on Substack, but during the middle of the year and the end of the year I make an exception. This happens to be one of those days.

For those not really familiar with some of my past posts on the subject, several years ago, I decided to start trying to manage to write a certain number of words per day. My intention behind this was try and help keep myself accountable as to how much I write and to try and push myself to be more productive. After a while, I decided on a minimum quota of 500 words per day. Later on, to reflect the work I do in both revising previous work or planning new writing, I also decided I could reach my minimum daily quota with 30 minutes of work on either revisions or planning.

In time, I started keeping records of this productivity and posting them online. I eventually settled on my current records-keeping system by the second half of 2017 and began using it to record full years the previous year.

Last year, for the first time, I decided to settle on a yearly goal for the first time ever: 200,000 total words, and meeting my daily writing goals 70 percent of the time. Based on my previous performance, I believed both of these goals were attainable.

As it turned out, I ended up writing 214,385 words in 2022, the best production for a year I’ve ever recorded. And although I didn’t match my all time mark of meeting daily quota 78 percent of the time, my 73 percent for 2022 definitely was great.

As a result, I set some new expectations for myself for this year. Going forward, I believe that 200,000 per year has to be my quota, not just my goal, for every year going forward, especially if I want to write as much as I want to write. I also decided to set a new goal of meeting my daily quotas 75 percent of the time.

I also set a few other writing goals not necessarily tied into productivity or word county. I’ll get to those in a minute and how well I’m meeting those goals, but let’s talk about the numbers first.

As of the beginning of July 2023, this is what I’ve written for the year:

Writing statistics for the first half of 2023:

Words: 117,182

Average words per month: 19,530

Minutes spent revising/editing: 4,645

Average minutes per month: 774

Daily Writing Goals Met: 91%

This represents the highest six-month total I have ever accumulated for the first part of the year, and the second highest six-month total for any period of time except for the 117,843 I wrote in the second half of 2019. The average amount of times I met my daily goal is the highest ever for any six-month period, with second place being, coincidentally, the second half of 2019.

So, I am more than 17,000 words ahead of my pace for this week and well on my way of meeting my daily writing quota mark. All of that - great, I’m happy to see it, now I have to keep it up.

What about the other goals I set for the start of the year? I’ll go over them, which I divided into strong, line-in-the-sand goals and then more nebulous, long-term stuff. I’ll also list , as well as the progress I’ve made so far regarding those goals.

Short-term Goals for 2023:

Get my book, The Yank Striker: A Footballer’s Beginning, published this year.

• Status: Mostly completed. I am still waiting on the release of the ebook version, which I am hoping will happen still this month. When that happens, you all will be the first to hear about it.

Writing the sequel to The Yank Striker.

• Status: Begun, but still a long way to go. If I manage to complete a rough draft by the end of this year, I would be happy. It might take a National Novel Writing Month-level effort in the end, but there’s still a chance I might have it.

Regularly publish on Substack and grow my readership.

• Status: Work in progress. Overall subscriptions are up, but I would like to try and attract more paid subscribers as well.

Long-term Goals for 2023-Beyond

Having a paid subscription option for my blogs on Substack and Wordpress.

• This is now active on both sites, but again, this is a work in progress. I would love to hear in the comments what might prompt some of you paid subscribers to hit a paid subscription. Would more original fiction and poetry be a draw? Workshopping or writing advice? Something else? Feel free to leave some suggestions in the comments.

Starting planning for a fantasy fiction project.

• Status: Some planning has happened for this, but not as much as I might have wanted. This has also been slightly complicated by the fact I have an idea for another series that just came to me last week. All I’ll say right now is I’m leaning toward posting something about it this weekend, and it involves another “sport” - professional wrestling.

So that’s where my goals are at as we sit at the halfway point of 2023. I’m hoping I keep things up and get even better as time goes on.