Since it seems like today’s daily writing prompt is another repeat, I’ll go into something else I was thinking about recently.

Today should be, I believe, the 362nd day in a row that I’ll have posted something to the blog. Given that I’m closing in on a 1-year streak, I decided to look into some stats. How many words have I written? How many posts? How does it compare to writing a full length novel in the same time frame?

Well, WordPress collects some of these things, but not in the way that I needed. So I decided to do some extra leg work today and check the word counts of all of my posts since October 16th, 2023 when I first started down this path of trying to write every single day. I’ll also be incorporating some numbers for last November’s NaNoWriMo, as proof of effort.

According to my calculations (I used Excel to help track all of this):

• 371 individual posts written
• 111,245 words just for the blog
  • 151,143 words when including NaNoWriMo 2023
• 299.85 average words per post
• 2,925 words in the longest post (although admittedly that was copying what I wrote for a writing contest)
  • 1,230 words in the longest post that DIDN’T include the writing contest results

That’s all I think I’m going to share, which is basically everything I was concerned with at this time (although, I totally did consider making some graphs.)

The key takeaway I want to point out, for myself as well as others who might be thinking of writing a full length novel (or two or three) is that even if you can only get down 300 words per day during some spare time, if you write every single day then you can definitely make it in a year and have the potential wiggle room for editing to bring total word count down to a reasonable level. Aim for that 100,000 word mark at just a few hundred words per day and you’re golden.

Good luck out there fellow writers!