Last year I did a summary of my writing stats and set out a goal, so it’s time to follow up on that and see what happened 🙂
First up is an updated chart for mcstoires.com:
| Year | Words posted to MCStories.com |
| 2008 | 18,072 |
| 2010 | 6,131 |
| 2011 | 3,506 |
| 2012 | 15,691 |
| 2013 | 4,520 |
| 2014 | 58,755 |
| 2015 | 33,338 |
| 2016 | 34,688 |
| 2017 | 29,851 |
| 2018 | 35,104 |
| 2019 | 79,872 |
That means I over doubled my mcsotires.com output from 2018 and had a career high as well.
As noted last year, getting my stats from my blog is a bit harder, see last years post for details about the tumblr stats from 2014 to 2018. For WordPress I am able to filter on month and then check each post for the word count so it’s more accurate but more tedious to do. This years count is lower as I stopped posted daily and went to twice weekly instead.
| Year | Words posted to blog |
| 2014 | 54,000 |
| 2015 | 91,250 |
| 2016 | 109,500 |
| 2017 | 127,750 |
| 2018 | 146,000 |
| 2019 | 104,811 |
That means my total writing output looks like this:
| Year | Words posted to MCStories.com | Words posted to my blog | Total |
| 2008 | 18,072 | 0 | 18,072 |
| 2010 | 6,131 | 0 | 6,131 |
| 2011 | 3,506 | 0 | 3,506 |
| 2012 | 15,691 | 0 | 15,691 |
| 2013 | 4,520 | 0 | 4,520 |
| 2014 | 58,755 | 54,000 | 112,755 |
| 2015 | 33,338 | 91,250 | 124,588 |
| 2016 | 34,688 | 109,500 | 144,188 |
| 2017 | 29,851 | 127,750 | 157,601 |
| 2018 | 35,104 | 146,000 | 181,104 |
| 2019 | 79,872 | 104,811 | 184,683 |
| Total | 319,528 | 633,331 | 952,893 |
I did set myself a goal for 2019 of 100k words for mcstories.com in 2019 and I didn’t quite get to it, though it did reveal a few things about when I do my writing. It turns out that I do most of my writing during the winter months, so while I start out strong in January to March, I pretty much go dormant for the sprint/summer/fall as I tend to be doing other things. Then I procrastinate doing any writing until the snow flies once more 🙂
By the end of December I had ~80k words written and posted to mcstoires.com , that’s not too bad really. I got to 80% of my goal and I think I could probably have powered through an extra 20k words if I’d really wanted to but I don’t know if they would have been quality works so I decided against trying it.
I was also a little surprised at how much content I’d written for my blog. I went to twice weekly postings and thought I’d be well under last years total. But it turns out that I was 3.5k words over my last years estimate. That means I either wrote a lot more than I thought (possible, I did noticed a few ~5k postings this year that probably could have been mcstories.com entries) or I was significantly underestimating my tumblr output. I suspect it’s the later, as for this year I went though each of my posts and added up WordPress’s word count for each post. That means this years total is pretty accurate, where as my tumblr counts were basically wild ass guesses 😉
As I didn’t quite make my goal this year, I’m going to keep the same goal for 2020 and see if I can make it with the new insight in to my writing habits. Specifically I’m going to try and even out my production and write and post at least one story a month.
If I keep to that plan, I should pass 1 million words (combined) written some time in March/April.
Hope everyone has a good new year!
