2018 Writing Year in Review

by | Dec 31, 2018 | Living the Writing Life | 0 comments

I said going in that it was going to be a hard year because I’d have less writing time than ever before and that turned out to be true in many frustrating ways… BUT it gave me a lot of time to stop and think about how I work and to refine some things and find my groove. That’s why you’ll notice I started getting a lot much more done in the back end of this year than I did in the front, despite not having any more time.

Instead of hitting you with a big wall of text, let’s just dive into what this year looked like in stats.

Projects

It doesn’t look like much but when you consider that I was juggling 2-3 versions of each of the SIX The Tale of Tales plays and had less writing time than ever and was the only adult responsible for two small children 95% of the time, I’m just glad I accomplished anything.

Writing Stats from (Dec 2017-Nov 2018)

Total Words Written

623,128 words

New Words Only

449,485 words (72% of total)

Day Spent Writing

272 days (75%)

Highest Word Count Month

November 125,057 words, 111,704 new words only
(Thank you, NaNoWriMo!)

Month by Month

A new feature I added on my word count spreadsheet this year that I found very motivating was a section that showed me my wordiest days and months from years past. This added an extra element to writing because it was fun to write a little more to get a day or month to chart in the top ten and to beat past days and months one by one.

Wordiest Days

  1. November 10, 2018 12,174
  2. November 4, 2018 11,857
  3. November 26, 2018 9,905
  4. December 17, 2017 8,354
  5. July 25, 2018 8,304

Wordiest Days (New Writing Only)

  1. November 10, 2018 12,174
  2. November 4, 2018 11,264
  3. November 26, 2018 8,751
  4. May 30, 2018 7,233
  5. July 26, 2018 7,211

Chart-worthy Months

three months on the overall list, two on the new writing only list

Playwriting Stats

I have never tracked this info before so I have nothing to compare it to but a lot of my playwright friends track all this so I thought… why not?

Number of Submissions Sent Out

0. Zip. Nada. I haven’t had time to send out one since 2016 so thank goodness for all my published plays that keep churning on without my having to do anything to get them productions.

Number of Productions

45 (18 if you don’t count anthologies and other shared credit productions)

Lots of playwrights track individual performances but that would be too much work to go back and calculate right now. Going forward, I’ll try to keep track of it but it’s somewhere around double that number, maybe a bit more.

Overall

Even when I went into this year knowing I wouldn’t have a lot of time and wouldn’t be able to get a lot done… it was still frustrating to not have a lot of time and to not get a lot done. So there’s that. But, as the graph above shows, I did find a kind of groove as the year went on and I did a lot of organizational, regrouping kind of work behind the scenes that I hope will serve me in the future.

Overall, this year went by in an absolute whirlwind and, while it was a scary and frustrating year for a lot of worldwide reasons, it was a pretty good one domestically. The kiddos are doing well and growing so fast it hurts my heart, the big one really loves school and the little one is growing to be an amazing little human just like her sister.

My theme for this year was balance and, while I can’t always say I found it, I did get a lot of really good time with my girls and still got some stuff done so I guess that’s all you can ask for!

Now let’s hope next year is a better year for everyone and we have a peaceful and productive 2019!

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