Piles of Words

 
Yesterday, the Gunwitch2 project rolled past 40,000 words. Which is cool. I started chapter 9 today (out of 23 outlined) and figure I'm approaching the halfway point.
 
Last week, I realized I had rolled past the 800,000 mark in total words of fiction, counted/estimated since 2003. Here's the full breakdown:

2003 – 122788 (Threads)
2004 – 20000 (Threads)
2005 – 9050 (Threads)
2006 – 230,000 (A Short Story a Day, includes The Door to the Sky and The Summoning Fire)
2007 – 107728 [48127 (The Girl Who Ran With Horses), 59601 (Gunwitch)]
2008 – 7960 (short stories for contests)
2009 – 27937 (The Girl Who Ran With Horses & Nano)
2010 – 110000 (stories + Nano)
2011 - 140,000 (Gunwitch, GoSH1, short stories, unfinished novels)
2012 – 39526 (so far)

 
Total: 815,000 words
 
If I keep up with my 2012 writing goals, I should have a much larger, rounder total number (which shan't be mentioned to avoid jinxing) before the end of the year. Also, if I keep up with my 2012 writing goals, I should (finally) exceed my previous best writing year of 2006.
 
I started that accounting in 2003, because that's when I started writing again. And when I started keeping a mostly-consistent record of how much I've written. Like most writers, I started this whole "I wannabe a writer" thing as a teenager. I have a handful of stories from my teenage years, and even a couple novels that kept not quite being finished. I still have most of that work, in one form or another (mostly typed hardcopy, some longhand), but like hell I'm going to either read it or try to count the words involved.
 
After college, I didn't write fiction so much–but I wrote (and refereed) a lot of RPG campaigns and scenarios, including a whole set of homebrew RPG rules and my own campaign worlds. I have no idea how many words all of that might add up to. One somewhat interesting side effect of my RPG hobby and many years spent running games is that I tend to plot my novels much the same way I plotted out RPG campaigns and adventure scenarios. You do what you know.
 
Those counts also do not include any of my nonfiction writing. Besides the two game development books from 2002 and 2005, I also wrote a number of tutorial-style game development Web articles (most of which are still out there, getting more and more out of date). And then there's 10+ years of writing for The Journal's mostly-monthly newsletter (tips and tricks, how-to-articles, and so on).
 
Finally, I have no idea how many words I've typed into my personal and professional journals since I started them in 1993. Last I checked, I had made over 16,000 entries in The Journal.
 
So, yeah, I'm calling my current tally 815,000. Which might seem like a lot, but it's not, not really. My fiction writing career is still quite young.
 
-David
 
Related Posts:
2011 – A Short Review by an Indie Author/PublisherOutline to Completed Novel Word Count RatioThe Approaching End – My Goals and Deadlines for 2012