Two years ago today (July 5, 2023), I wrote in my daily reflection:
I’ll tell myself again that I need to read more and write more. I can do it.
Since then, I’ve published:
- 11 articles totaling 44,506 words
- 14 short ebooks totaling 57,738 words
- 1 long ebook totaling 7,828 words
- 50 newsletters totaling 52,781 words
- 3 micro-fiction stories totaling 2,459 words.
That’s 165,312 words from my fingers to the world in 24 months.
I was curious about my ratio of writing to publishing, as well; this count isn’t perfect, but it looks like I’ve written about 774,231 words1 in those two years, roughly 1,060 per day2.
Obviously, some days are wordier3 than others; I happen to see that March 16, 2025, was a wordy day: 4,276 words. And June 6, 2025, was a less-wordy day: 274 words.
What I haven’t said yet is what changed to drive those numbers up: I added a daily morning pages practice to my life. My first entry is July 7, 2023, just two days after that quote at the top of this post. Since then, I’ve written morning pages on 119 days (about one in six days), but after a slow 2024, my 2025 pace has been better than one in three.
I hate to say it, but the “secret” for me was a) putting a system in place that encourages me to write every day (my Obsidian daily note creates a new Morning Pages task) and b) giving myself an inexhaustible list of prompts (selected from Internet lists of prompts; my own brain; and asking LLMs for suggestions).
Who knew.
Here’s to twelve more months. 🥂
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Outside of my day job. I cannot begin to imagine how many words I’ve written for work, but those aren’t the words I’m interested in counting, no matter how much I’m intrigued and/or distracted by the idea of a script that can count all the words in my Sent and Proposals folders over the last two years. ↩︎
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If I were a full-time writer, that would be 1,489 per weekday, roughly 75% of Stephen King’s self-reported daily output; but of course I am not, so almost all of my writing is done on evenings and weekends. ↩︎
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I originally wrote “more productive,” but I have no idea: maybe zero of those March 16 words were published, but all 274 of those June 6 words were. And what if I had to write all 4,276 of those words so I could get them out of my head and throw them away to make room for better ones? ↩︎
