Crunching The Fourth Draft Figures

Now I've come down from the elation of actually closing the document housing my fourth draft and sending it off for a lucky someone to read, I decided to open my spreadsheet of daily totals and see how the whole endeavour panned out. Please tell me I'm not the only writer obsessed with statistics. It's a habit I picked up in my last job and, actually, all my PhD stuff is organised onto spreadsheets that do several wonderful but useless things. I like the information there, so I can berate or congratulate myself as necessary, So, let's take a look.

I started the fourth draft on 16th January and completed it on 6th April. My calculation there is that it took me 81 days.

I wrote nothing for this particular story on 31 days of the 81. That means I only really worked for 50 days on it. That makes my average word count over the days I actually wrote 1361 words.

On 27 days I wrote less than 1000 words.

On 15 days I wrote between 1000 and 2000 words.

On 3 days I wrote between 2000 and 3000 words.

On 5 days I wrote more than 3000 words.

My highest daily word count was my last (6821) and my lowest was 324 on 26th January.

Well, I have to say, I like those figures. They're not too shabby. It proves that I could complete a draft in two months if I worked everyday. It also proves that the slowly-but-surely method yields results. I didn't manage to meet my minimum target of 1000 words on more than half of my working days and yet I still completed the thing. My five 'super-spurt' days were pivotal in the success but it would only have taken me a few more weeks had I stuck to lesser amounts.

I shall now stop dwelling over the fourth draft. I'll have enough to contend with when I deal with the next one...