I’m doing okay.
Having started this daily writing commitment on December 31, 2015, I haven’t missed a day. I celebrated in a blog when I reached the forty-day mark, then let day sixty and day eighty go by without a mention. More than eighty days in a row, that’s what I’ve done! As I managed to get a little wordy in some of my reminiscing, I am now averaging about five hundred words a day. Whew!
While dwelling on that self-congratulatory idea, I decided to do the math. How many words would I have written when this year is done? The answer (without a calculator, thank you!) is 183,500 words. Approximately. Maybe I should have been writing a book, rather than a simple, navel-gazing blog. Surely, at 183,500 words, I could have written War and Peace, or some lesser equivalent. Well, not exactly.
It turns out, the English translation of War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, has, by some estimates, just over 590,000 words. Even more surprising, it doesn’t even make Wikipedia’s list of the 27 longest books. Of those, I recognized only a few: …And Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmyer has upwards of 600,000 words; Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand clocked in at 645,000 words; Les Miserables by Victor Hugo has 655,000 words. All of them were soundly beaten by the King James Version of the Bible, which has over 788, 200 words!
So, that’s discouraging! If I manage to continue this (not easy!) commitment for the rest of this year, I will have the satisfaction of having written the equivalent of a mass market paperback. Possibly a mystery story , a romance novel or some vampire tale for young adults. I’d might as well just continue on with my own self-indulgent daily ramblings!
cindyricksgers 