A Month of Blogging

Today's post will be simple. I only want to talk about one thing: I managed to blog every day in April, including those days when I was exceptionally busy (doing final assignments, out of the house all day, the ball). It was fun, though. I loved sitting down and writing a post about life, or writing, or comic books, or the terrifying reality that adult life will well and truly start in a matter of weeks.

Fun, right?

It's helped me get a lot of thoughts out, though, in a way that nothing else has. On top of that, it's ensured that   I stuck to my New Year's Resolution to write every day this year.

But just how much did I write this month? Here are the statistics:

Over the past 29 days, I wrote 24402 words, an average of 813 words per post.

My longest post was 1843 words, on April 11th: The Write Life.

My shortest post was a mere 183 words, on April 24th: Shortlisted. I wrote it on my phone on a bus late at night, unsure what to say.

My most viewed post was Aspiring? from April 6th.

My most commented-on post was When I Grow Up from April 2nd.

This month has had the most views overall out of any other month since statistics kicked in in July 2008.

Let's look at those statistics in terms of what they are equivalent to. During the month, I wrote enough words to have written a novella. My longest post consists of more words than the average required to complete NaNoWriMo. People engaged most with posts about dreams and aspirations in writing.

Considering the amount of work I've had to do, the last-chance days with friends, working weekends, still being in college for half the month, and having two poetry nights to attend, I think I did quite well to have written all that I did. If I were to replicate such writing outside of blogging, I could still write a novella per month, or a 75,000 word novella in three. This is without pushing myself to write the NaNoWriMo minimum every day. Doing that would half the amount of time it takes me write something - given the average words per post - which means that, in theory, even with a full-time job, I could still write a few books per year.

That makes the future much less terrifying.

There has always been this fear that full-time employment would reduce the amount of writing I could do to a bare minimum, and not enough to actually pursue it as a career. Given the fact that I still work a lot under pressure from college assignment and Teaching Placement, I think I'll be alright.

And, for the record, as of this post I have written 24900 words in the month, an average of 830 per post. That's pretty cool, right? If you want to check out this month's posts, click on the following link: http://paulcarrollwriter.blogspot.com/p/april-2013-posts.html