2012 Writing Goals Debriefed: Did I succeed in writing 500,000 words as planned?

In 2011, I fell short of my writing goal. My goal was 500,000 words and I only wrote 392,074. But I decided to keep that 500,000 goal for 2012 because I’ve been steadily trying to ramp up how much I write with the ultimate goal of 1 million words a year and I hadn’t been that far off.

But, as discussed, 2012 threw a ton of curve balls at me. So, you’re wondering, how close did I get to that 500,000 words?

218,638 words. Only 43% of my goal.

I was going to write “hangs head in shame” here but, you know what? No. I’m not embarrassed about that number at all. Yes, it’s half of what I set out to write but 2012 was a really hard year and I’m amazed I even managed to write that much.

How does that number break down?

• It was an average of 597 words a day. Since the standard advice is to write at least 500 a day, that feels pretty solid.
• Just about 74% of that was new writing while the other 26% was editing*. I’d like that to be closer to 50/50.

*=Editing takes much longer than writing so I track editing by time and include it in my count at a rate of 1,000 words an hour (since I write an average of 2,500+ words an hour and editing is at least twice as slow) . If I totally rewrite something from scratch, that goes in as writing.

Here’s how those words looked day by day over the course of the year:

So, not my usual slow and steady wins the race. Lots of ups and downs. But, for a while there, I was on pace to hit 1,000 a day before it all went to heck. (New Only shows only the new writing I did without counting editing or rewriting. In an ideal world, that would be at least at the 500 a day line.)

And here’s a look at the month by month breakdown:

The summer was just a big old FAIL wasn’t it? But THANK GOD for NaNoWriMo. It kicks my butt into gear every single year and was my wordiest month of the year (which is especially impressive when you consider that I was both an ML and 8 months pregnant in November). Since my second biggest month was Script Frenzy in April which they’ve freaking cancelled I’m going to really have to hustle to keep productive around that time this year.

I was going to post the breakdown of what percentages of the total each project represented but my spreadsheet math seems to be failing there hardcore so instead I’ll just tell you this: my NaNoWriMo project was my biggest fiction project of the year but the largest percentage of words went to non-fiction this year across my e-commerce blog and eBooks I’m working on in conjunction with that site. Other projects that took up a lot of my time this year include Polar Twilight (duh), The Muppet Play (which I hope to finish in the next few months), Mistress Novel and, surprisingly (because I have no memory of working on it at all), Wife Novel. I’m sad to discover that TheLibrary constituted only 1% of this year considering how much work I did on it summer of 2011 in my class. (The complete list of my works in progress is here if you want a refresher.)

If you’re wondering where I’m getting all these charts and stats from, I have an insane spreadsheet that I’ve been tweaking for years that I use to keep track of all my writing projects and it automatically generates all these for me so I can see where I am and stay on pace. I showed it to a fellow writer in person once and she looked at me like I was insane but I’m cool with that. I like knowing where my time is going and how much I get done each year.

What does this mean for this year? I’ve already set my goal for 2013 but this is getting long so I’ll save that for another post.

I realize everyone probably already posted their New Years Writing Resolutions type posts a while ago and that I’m still playing catch up but I’d still like to know, how close did you come to achieving your writing goals in 2012?