However you measure it, 2013 was my most productive year in the 20 odd years I’ve been dabbling with this writing malarkey. Here’s the stats for last year (numbers in brackets are for 2012) Stories sold: 7 (5) Writing time: 265.5 hours (64.2) Total word count : 169,080 (34,520) Short story word count: 39,683 (3,945) Average words per hour: 726 (626) Average words per day (full year): 463 (94) Days of writing: 251 (48) Average words per day of writing: 674 (719) First drafts completed: Short Stories 16 (3) First drafts completed: Novels 2 (0) Final drafts completed: Short Stories 14 (8) New submissions: 64 (50) New markets submitted to: 33 (21) Submissions still outstanding: 5 Blog posts: 107 (56) Lots of good numbers there, starting with the total words written – just over 169,000 words. That’s my most productive year so far. The only year that comes close was 2010 when I wrote the original version of The Ghost Smuggler and it’s still almost 50,000 words more than I managed that year. Those words took me 11 days 1 hour 30 minutes to write – another record breaking year. Those numbers look even better in light of this … Read More
Vital Statistics 2012
Here’s the rundown of my writing stats from 2012 (numbers in brackets are values from 2011). Stories sold: 5 (1) Writing time: 64.2 hours (114.6) Total word count : 34,520 (24,418) Short story word count: 3,945 (24,418) Average words per hour: 626 (408) Average words per day (full year): 94 (67) Days of writing: 48 (70) Average words per day of writing: 719 (207) First drafts completed: 3 short stories (6 short stories) Final drafts completed: 7 short stories (5) New flash fiction stories completed: 1 (3) New submissions: 50* (36) New markets submitted to: 21 (26) Submissions still outstanding: 4 Writing blog posts: 56 (53) *Plus two ‘chapters’ submitted to the Clive Barker project on deviantART 2012 was clearly the year of the submission. I think there’s a couple of reasons for that. I have 20-25 stories that I’m comfortable sending out and there are now quite a few high quality markets that have quick turnarounds so I get the bad news and can submit elsewhere quicker than in the past. Most of those stories are sitting in the to-submit pile at the moment so the first thing I’m going to be doing next year is getting them all out … Read More
Vital Statistics 2011
A good writing year this year, at least as far as completed short stories goes (values in brackets are the numbers from 2010) Stories sold: 1 (1) Writing time: 114.6 hours (149.2) Total word count : 24,418 (119,514) Average words per hour: 408 (877) Average words per day: 67 (327) Average words per day of writing: 207 (583) First drafts completed: 6 short stories (2 short stories, 1 novel) Final drafts completed: 5 short stories (0) New flash fiction stories completed: 3 (1) New submissions: 36 (23) New markets submitted to: 26 (14) Submissions still outstanding: 14 Writing blog posts: 53 (0) Day job blog posts: 12 (0) Overall I’m pretty happy with those numbers, bearing in mind that 2010 was focused on writing the first draft of The Ghost Smuggler, whereas this year was all about short fiction and even then, most of the writing took place in the last half of the year. I’ve also been very busy with my day job and my wife and I trained for, and ran, four half-marathons. So that wraps up 2011. Thanks for dropping by, I hope you all had a great year and that next year is even better.