In a past blog post I told you about how my BFF Neil Gaiman told me (and several hundred other people) that as a writer I needed to finish something and get it out there.  He also told me that I had to call myself a writer.  Well as of this last Sunday this writer finished the first draft of her first novel.  Yes, dear readers, my first book is done!  I literally typed “The End” at the end because, holy crap, THE END!

So, because I am who I am, I can now start analyzing the books stats!  Are you excited?  I am!  See, I keep a spreadsheet documenting how much I write each day.  (Totally normal.  Everyone does this, I’m sure.)  Ready to discover book stats with me?

Book start date: July 15, 2013

Book end date: August 2, 2015

Book duration:  748 days

Book length (pages): 171

Book length (words): 98,942 words

The novel took me 2 years and 18 days to finish.  On average I wrote 132 words per day.  Let’s marvel over that tiny number.  132 words per day can get you a long novel in just over 2 years.  Of course that number is misleading.

Actual writing days: 88

Max words in a day: 6630

Min words in a day: 23

Average words per writing day: 1124

I only wrote 11% of the days I had available, or about 1.5 days out of every two weeks.  That seems like a paltry pace, even for a fulltime working mom.  Digging deeper I find that from October 21, 2013 to January 7, 2015 (443 days, or 1 year 78 days) I only managed to write on 7 days producing 8,018 words.  Yep, those were the Afthead family depression days when my emotional and mental energy was needed for something more personal than my novel.  Interesting though that I still averaged 1145 words per writing day during that stretch; I am consistent.  If I take out those 443 days as an anomaly I find that my book took 305 days (let’s say 10 months) and on average I wrote 29% of the days, or 4 days every two weeks.  That seems about right with my sense of how the composition went and also seems pretty reasonable.  If I start now and keep up my average writing pace, I could have book number two done in under a year.  That’s cool!  I know, I’m ignoring the second draft of book one in this number and assuming good fortune in the Afthead world.  Still, I feel proud of what I accomplished and, with caveats, confident about what I could accomplish going forward at this reasonable writing rate.

One last set of numbers for those of you still with me.

Max week = 12262 words

Days writing in max week = 3

Average words per writing day in max week = 4,087

This of course was the last week of the novel.  The end was coming and I could feel it.  At this pace, we’ll call it the QMJ (Quit My Job) pace, I could write a second book in 24 weeks.  Whoa!  That gives me some perspective about how real writers manage to produce a book a year.

That’s Part 1 of the book finishing adventure.  Next we’ll move onto part 2, the emotional part.

The End.  (Those two words.  Bliss I tell you!)