So I was looking up information on using the wc or Word Count command in *nix on Stack Overflow and it made me wonder how many words I've written in 17 years of on and off blogging. A quick command:

wc -w _posts/*

wc: _posts/_site: read: Is a directory
  543089 total

This is one of those numbers which seems staggering but I recently saw that Russell Beattie claimed over a million words over 15 years. So it seems possible.

Note: If I look at the number of posts using wc -l _posts/20*.md, I get a number that seems way, way too high so I'm not going to talk about number of posts at all.

A bit of math:

select 543089 / 17;
+-------------+
| 543089 / 17 |
+-------------+
|  31946.4118 |
+-------------+

So that means 32,000 words per year. If we assume 250 words per page then:

select 31946.4118 / 250;
+------------------+
| 31946.4118 / 250 |
+------------------+
|     127.78564720 |
+------------------+

Or about one novella a year.

Now I took a pretty serious hiatus from blogging for about 8 years (2006 to 2014) in my post Feedster seclusion so that makes the years actually 17 - 8 or 9 and this changes the math a bit:

select 543089 / 9;
+------------+
| 543089 / 9 |
+------------+
| 60343.2222 |
+------------+

and

 select 60343.2222 / 250;
 +------------------+
 | 60343.2222 / 250 |
 +------------------+
 |     241.37288880 |
 +------------------+

If we assume that there are 250 writing days in a year (i.e the weekdays) then we can look at words per day:

select 543089 / (9*250); 
+------------------+
| 543089 / (9*250) |
+------------------+
|         241.3729 |
+------------------+

And that's interesting – just about a page per day. I am trying hard to build a writing habit these days and tracking my metrics much, much more closely. Onward!