Thursday 1 January 2015

Happy New Year: Reflecting on Year 2

My surprise Xmas present from my partner – a folding bicycle. It's very red.

Last year was a one where my achievements exceeded my original expectations.  This year not so much.

I began the year working on The Bureau, my fourth novel, but then switched over to re-writing Bad Dog, which l ended up doing three times.  This makes it very hard for me to actually calculate the mount of work I've done this year.  The three drafts were 87,999, 88,908 and 81,804 words each, which comes to a total of 258,711 words, but looking at the original draft and the end draft totals, the amount of actual words written comes to either about 10,000 words, or according to my calculations a total of about 31,478 words changed.

My fourth novel has, as a result of all the re-writes, rather suffered with me only managing to write just under 30,000? words, bringing its running total up to 47,788 words.  The bottom line is that re-writing doesn't give me the feeling of satisfaction I got from writing three first drafts last year.

I also wrote two short stories, which came to 2,806 words.

But blog posts are writing and this year I posted 62 pieces here, which amounted to 23,201 words, and 45 posts on my other blog, which amounted to 12,259 words.

And of course I wrote four magazine articles, and a piece for a games publisher, which came to a total of 11,166 words.

Grand total: It could be as high as 337,543 or as low as 110,910 words.

Using 210 days as a baseline the latter figure looks abysmal, but as my partner reminded me (ironically I may add) that using measures of one thing as performance indicators of another is not good practice.  So being mindful of said observation I will just say that his year has been one of consolidation.

Finally I would like to wish you all a Happy New Year and thank you again for reading, your support and comments are truly welcome.

4 comments:

  1. I have been riding folding bikes for five years now and they are a blast! I envy you your Brompton knock off! When Ana and I were up in London in August, I looked at buying one. Then reality hit me: it costs as much as my monthly salary and riding a. Ike that expensive in Rio de Janeiro would be just insane. So Dahons for me! Happy New Year!

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    1. And you too. BTW: I've been told to add some assembly required on my second-hand Birdy, which we couldn't afford to buy new.

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  2. Replies
    1. Cheers John. Hopefully when the weather gets nicer we can cycle to the train station, fold the bikes up and get out of London for the day. It will be good for me too.

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