I haven’t shown my word counts in a while, so I thought it was about time. It’s July, after all, so I’ve got more than half a year behind me and a great amount of data to show improvements.

First, I am comparing similar data sets from last year and this year. (Jan 1st to July 5th.)

I had the same amount of “Zero Word Count” days in both years. This year I had whooping cough which lasted a month and kept me from writing much. Last year I had family issues that had to be dealt with before I could write, along with the normal days of laziness, or just busy with other things.

The average has gone up. 560 for last year, 615 for this year. I always write more in the second half of the year, and NaNoWriMo is coming up, for which I have another book already outlined. It will be interesting to see how the numbers shift, and if I can finally get my average per day up over 1000 by October. If I can then NaNoWriMo won’t be so exhausting.

The biggest difference this year is I haven’t had any 3000+ word days yet. Last year I only had two, but one of them was on this chart. That drove up the average quite a bit. I think the only think keeping my average up this year is having fewer days with very low (under 200) word counts. Plotting a little more when I get stuck is helping.

I’m hoping to continue the trend of working more and more till I can put out three books a year. That seems like a reasonable amount.