Writing in 2018: The Stats

It’s time for some statistics.

At the end of each year I go through all the posts I’ve published online and add up the total word count for the year. This is purely for my own curiosity to see how the past year stacked up against the ones before it. With a podcast playing in the background I slowly go through the saved file of each post I’ve published and enter the number of words in the body of each post into a cell in an Excel spreadsheet. Once that’s done I have Excel add up all the numbers and then that year’s total word count is revealed. For the year 2018 the total number of words I published online was:

141,708

That’s actually much higher than I thought 2018’s total would be. With the bit of scaling back that I did to my publishing schedule this year I had assumed that I’d finish 2018 with about 100,000 words published so to see the actual total at 141,708 was a pleasant surprise. For context, below are the word count totals of each of the preceding years that I’ve been writing online.

2012: 42,546
2013: 16,239
2014: 17,554
2015: 51,588
2016: 154,458
2017: 78,069
2018: 141,708

This makes 2018 my second-highest year in terms of words published online, which again is not at all what I expected. Over the years my online writing output has waxed and waned and it’s good to see that last year had a pretty significant increase over the year before it.

As a bonus piece of statistics from this website, below are the top ten longest posts I published last year with links to each of them:

1. The Brett Kavanaugh Confirmation Saga – 6,466 words
2. Tokyo: The Endless City – 5,225 words
3. Seoul & The DMZ: Past & Present – 4,736 words
4. Kyoto: Cultural Capital – 4,375 words
5. Jeju Island: Life on the Road – 3,996 words
6. Tokyo (Second Visit): The Calm After The Storm – 3,768 words
7. E3 2018 Conference Reactions – 3,560 words
8. Nagasaki: Western Influences – 3,097 words
9. Osaka & Nara: The Running Man & The Deer – 3,062 words
10. Hakodate: Learning from Mistakes – 3,042 words

No surprise, the travelogue posts from Asia 2017 heavily dominated this list. Travelogue stories are normally among the longest writing pieces I generate and I’m guessing the ones I’ll eventually publish for Italy 2018 will be among this year’s wordiest posts.

Finally, since it’s a tradition for me to include some sort of celebratory gif whenever I announce my writing progress online, please enjoy a gif from Rocky IV.