Full 2025 Writing Stats

I’ve been very bad about tallying up all of last year’s writing, but I think I’m finally done with it.

• In 2025, I wrote 104,303 words. Of those words,
  • 5559 were for this blog (29 short posts),
  • 3,660 were in 2 essays
  • 26,396 were for my journal,
  • 43,436 were for handouts, scripts, and slides for lessons (15 lessons),
  • 15,692 were on various social media accounts,
  • 12,094 were poetry (68 poems – a lifetime record),
  • and 7,566 were in short stories (36 pieces of flash fiction).
  • If you tally all those numbers up, I wrote 150 discrete items, not counting social media posts and journal entries because those don’t really get published. (So 150 items in 215 days, which means about 1 item every 1 and a quarter days)
• There were only 120 days that I didn’t write anything, mostly due to illness, travel, or moving my kids from house to house. So I wrote on 2/3rds of the days of the year, which basically comes down to working on writing 5 days a week and leaving myself weekends for living, if I were the kind of person that followed a schedule like that. I mean, I try, but there were loads of weeks where I missed several weekdays and wrote straight through the weekends.
• I only submitted about 5 items all year because it was just sooooo much chaos. I had 2 acceptances and the last 3 items are still well within their response timezones (there’s a better word for this, but the phone in the next room keeps ringing and ringing and I cannot think of it). The two acceptances will be published in early to mid 2026.
• I had 15 speaking engagements last year. The vast majority did not pay, but were for a group that both feeds my soul and lets me practice my topics with them. Two were for free for the library (who I love and who graciously supports two of my writing groups), but I got several paid teaching side gigs out of them, so that about broke even in terms of payment, really.
• As for reading, I finished 65 books and read parts of another 13, mostly for research, but also a couple of things I’ve had to mark DNF because I didn’t like their take on the topic or the writing style or something.

That’s it! One more year as a writer in the books. 🙂