With the absence of a subject for the OpenBook Bloghop this week, here’s a post that I was going to publish when my internet went down in July.
I’m introverted. Anyone who knows me will tell you that, if we’ve just met, I don’t say a lot. But once I get comfortable with a situation, it’s hard to shut me up. Whether that’s a good thing is not for me to say; it’s just the way I am.
This reticence doesn’t extend to my writing, where I can often write three or four thousand words a day. Marketing is another matter. I don’t do it, for many reasons. I’m writing because I want to. My work is available but not necessarily good enough for public consumption.
At least according to some people on social media.
Because of the negativity it attracts, I don’t really have a lot of confidence in its worth. Especially as my teachers always took great delight in telling me that I couldn’t write to save my life, and any words I did manage to string together had no merit.
In fact, it took me until I got to my fifties before I finally decided that I wanted to write down the ideas that had always been buzzing around in my head. Once I started, I found that I couldn’t stop. And, no matter what people say or think, I will keep writing.
As an autistic person, numbers are very important to me. I need to know totals, averages and all sorts of weird and wonderful statistics about whatever I get involved with. It might be miles per gallon for my car, or the distances between places that I visit. Or anything else that other, normal people wouldn’t even consider.
And the numbers have to be accurate, even if it takes me all day to arrive at the figure.
Recently, I was prompted by a post I saw on Threads to try to find out how many words I’ve written. I realised that I’d never actually counted my own total. I knew that I couldn’t include my output on social media; I have no way of counting all my posts and comments on platforms that I no longer use.
When I took a look at everything else, I found that getting the word counts and adding them together was a simple process.
The total was quite shocking. I never expected it to be that many.
Well over three million words!
These figures are correct for the end of July, 2026.
First, my published novels, all 28 of them. 2,170,326
Then my short stories and drabbles, 157,653.
Next, my RichardDeeSciFi blog, 997,008
Finally, my works in progress, 282,116
The total is 3,607,103.
At the moment, it’s increasing by about 5-10000 words a week.
I know, it’s a lot, and it will be more than that. As well as the social media stuff, I had three Blogger blogs, back in the day, although there wasn’t that much fiction on them. They mostly concerned my life at work and here in Devon, and the things that I got up to. Things like country walks, baking bread and working on the River Thames.
That’s another story.
I have no easy way of calculating how many words were penned there, between 2011 and 2017. Perhaps one day, I’ll try to find a way to add them all up.
And the total might surprise me.
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