Author's Notes on: The End of the Year

Goodbye, 2021!

It’s been a crazy year.

I don’t even know where to begin, really.

I started this substack in August, but only got serious about it around late September, when I officially made the call to take a gap year from college. It was a difficult decision, but I’m very glad I made it. Writing and creating content for Author’s Notes has made me so much happier than anything had in a long, long time.

I needed this. I needed time to focus on my writing, time to focus on myself, and most of all, I just needed a break.

And that’s what I got, in its own way. My sleep schedule may still be very broken, but that’s nothing new and I’d much rather it be broken because I’m up late writing something I love than stressing over college lab reports and homework.

Part of me really wants to make this article inspiring and deep. It would feel fitting to send off the year with something like that, as this may be the last article that’s posted in the year 2021. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a few drafts of this article that went into the meaning of life and the tragedy of linear time.

…But honestly? The point of it all is just that I’m so happy to be doing what I love. That’s it.

…And also I’m a major nerd that can and will use spreadsheets at every given opportunity. And what better time to break out the spreadsheet than at the end of the year? For what might be the final article of 2021?

So that’s what I did.

While this platform does offer some stats that I’m able to see, it doesn’t cover everything, especially not in the kind of depth I wanted to explore. The main thing I wanted to know was my total WORD COUNT, and furthermore, I wanted to break that down by content as well. Substack doesn’t have a word count built-in, so I had to use outside programs to calculate it.

Check out the charts I ended up getting below!

[ I don’t know why anyone would want to see the whole spreadsheet I did with the raw data and all that, but I figured I might as well link it anyway if anyone did! <SPREADSHEET LINK> ]

There weren’t any huge surprises anywhere, but it’s still interesting to see. The charts on the left side are broken down by the number of articles I’ve written, while the right side is broken down by word count.

Notably, I classified two of the supplemental files from Cardinal as Story instead of Art/Extras (because they were written as narrative experiences), and there was one article that had art for both Sleepless and Cardinal so there was a bit of double-counting but that article was very small and didn’t affect anything in any major way.

Interestingly, at first glance Sleepless has the highest average word count, but this actually isn’t 100% true. Cardinal’s average is also counting supplemental files/art, etc which tend to be much shorter. If you only count the mission logs, Cardinal’s average word count actually comes in at a whopping 4026.4 words per Mission Log.

Also of note, the “free” category also contains things like announcements that are routinely only a few hundred words, if that, which is likely why it’s so low.

Get this though: my total word count is 81,415, with 54,154 of that being attributed to the combined efforts of Sleepless and Cardinal starting in October. Novel-length is considered to be around 50k words. That means that since I started this blog, I’ve written more than a novel’s worth of content between these two projects! That’s crazy!

I can’t believe the progress that’s been made in just these few months. Author’s Notes has changed focuses more than once already, but I think I’m starting to land on the content that really gets me excited, and I hope it excites you all too!

I’m looking forward to a 2022 full of even more writing and additional projects, and I can’t say enough how much everyone’s support has meant to me.

The majority of this got done in only 3-4 months. I can’t wait to come back to this at the end of next year and see just how much more progress I’ve made!

---

Happy holidays, Happy New Year, and I can’t wait to see you all in 2022 soon!