It looks like I’ve finally hit 1000 blog posts. I started pretty slowly in early 2007 and many of my early posts were entirely quotations or excerpts from what I was reading at the time. Over the years, actual original content has become a bit more predominant. It would be fun to run some more detailed stats on it sometime. Unfortunately, the regx functions in MySQL don’t work quite how I expect and I don’t want to bother with figuring them right now without all my tools handy. Oh well.
Still, I was able to get the following word count for all published posts: 361,272
Now, I have been faithful from the beginning put nearly every quotation or excerpt in blockquotes, making them indented on the page. There are exceptions, but they are few and they are balanced out my exceptions in the other direction I think. Fortunately, this allows me to easily remove them from the word count, revealing how many of those words are actually my own: 182,419.
Looking at this number is encouraging to me. I would someday like to write a book. Could I actually do it? Well, The Hobbit clocks in at 95K – about half of my original output for the past six years. That’s doable.
Why do I blog? Because I want to become a better writer. I was terrible and I wanted to be better. Now I am slightly less than terrible and there are even occasional satisfying sentences and even whole paragraphs to be discovered. It’s a joy – one that has proven more consistent (and possible) than practicing a musical instrument during the last half-decade. I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon, even if there are no readers. We’ll see if I’m ready to tackle something more substantial after 2000 posts.