recipe for disaster

[lagilman]

Go to bed with the news story of a tiger attack in a zoo in San Francisco.

Wake up with an oversized marmalade cat grooming your ear, one paw firmly placed on your scalp, the other on your neck.

Yes, awake. wide awake. Thank you, Boomerang.


Much to do today, homahgawd.

I've been noticing a lot of folk toting up their word count for the year. Interesting. I never thought to do that -- to be honest, it feels like adding work onto an already full plate. But people do seem to get satisfaction out of the number.

Do you writer-folk here keep track, or no? Why? What's the payoff if you do, or the reason why you don't? And do you keep non-fiction and fictions separate, or is it all Words? Your host is curious.

Comments

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

I keep track of fictional word counts (hm), and I do it pretty much daily when I'm writing. I like to watch the numbers climb, mostly. :)

[ex-fashioni.livejournal.com]

Oh jeez, I can only imagine what it must have felt like to wake up to Boomerang perched in place. (Very grateful that Jack sleeps with the boy at the moment.)

Re: the word count-- no. Not overall, at any rate. I keep track for specific projects, but not cumulative. Mostly because between first drafts and rewrites and the like, it seems like there would be a fair amount of overlap, creating a false, or at the very least, inaccurate number. I prefer thinking in terms of actual projects.

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

I do it to manage my own productivity, essentially. (Also, counting word production is part of my IRS-mandated work diary, providing continual and substantial effort at my business of writing.)

Where counting words is a trap, speaking specifically from the business process perspective, is that it doesn't properly account for rewriting.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

The IRS require you to keep a work diary?!?

Eek. (Yet another reason to be glad I get to pay tax to HMRC rather than having to deal with the IRS.)

[lagilman]

The IRS require you to keep a work diary?!?

I don't know -- I never kept one, at least, not in that sense. I track my expenditures, sure [a spreadsheet of work-related income/outlay, etc], and a record of where I've submitted what work, but never anything specific to the actual writing thereof...

[considering a chunk of my income comes from writing marketing copy, where less is the goal, that could require some interesting explainations... "It says here you wrote 200 words in one day, and were paid $X? How do you account for that?" "Well, I wrote 300, but had to cut it down to 110.... why are you looking at me like that?"]

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

The IRS doesn't require me to produce a work diary at tax filing. But if I am ever audited and they question my status as a professional writer (hopefully somewhat unlikely at this point given how easy it is to verify my literary footprint), the work diary is about the simplest means to demonstrate my continued and consistent production.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Oh.

No problem here -- I sold my first short story before I left university, so I've effectively always had a literary footprint to point to. And if HMRC ever audit me, I'm prepared to drop a shelf-metre of wood pulp on the auditor's desk if they even dream of querying what I do for a living. But I get the point. Although I'm not sure why they'd query your production; about all they could productively do is see if you're hiding additional sales from them, right? In which case, a diary asserting that on June the umpty-fifth you wrote 1100 words isn't going to cut much ice because they'll be investigating the possibility that you actually wrote 1150 and sold the other 50 without telling them.

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

What tim_pratt said elsewhere in this thread. They're not so concerned with the details of my work. It's that within the US tax code, being a writer offers some of the broadest latitudes for deductions, and therefore for abuse. There's an informal 'hobby' rule about how many years you can take a loss without showing meaningful income -- this is meant to deal with people who claim to be writer and take all kinds of deductions for it without ever actually doing any work. The work diary helps avoid being trapped in that rule.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Even though I don't have any professional (i.e. book or magazine) publications to my name in the past decade, I do have a website where I pimp my work. I can show income through that website, can show a substantial output on a yearly basis, and can list down deductions directly related to the site, and generally only take deductions commensurate with the income on the site (i.e. I don't take deductions above and beyond the operational costs of writing and distribution). Still, I can see how that could get hinky.

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

Yep. I've known media tie-in writers who deduct their cable bills, quite legitimately, as a research expense. Try explaining that to your average accountant or IRS employee.

[lagilman]

Try explaining that to your average accountant or IRS employee.

Actually, the average IRS employee (if by that you mean an auditor) seems to have a pretty decent grasp of what a freelance writer can deduct. All they want to see is the paper trail that supports the fact that you did indeed pay thus for this, to be used for that, and it all ties back into the writing [or the research prior to the writing].

The IRS doesn't care how many trees die, so long as you can document it.

[tim-pratt.livejournal.com]

Yep. I keep a work diary for the same reason. And self-employed artists get audited at a disproportionately high rate, so it's not unlikely that it'll happen at some point.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

It's a little proof I haven't in fact sat on my ass all year doing nothing.

Even when it feels like it.

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

Does it prove that no one else sat on your ass?

:: ducks and covers ::

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

An ongoing problem, actually. *g*

[chanel19.livejournal.com]

I do keep track of word count on individual projects but I've never thought of doing it for the whole year. OTOH, I haven't sold anything yet and just started revisions on my first book, so maybe I will at some point.

[tchernabyelo.livejournal.com]

I count words for two reasons.

1). It is a measure of progress, though by no means the only measure (who can tell whether the 100,000+ words I've written this year are actually "better" or not than the 200,000+ of two years ago?)

2). When I sell stuff, I get paid by the word (10 out of 12 sales to date, anyway) so it makes sense to count them :)

[lagilman]

2). When I sell stuff, I get paid by the word (10 out of 12 sales to date, anyway) so it makes sense to count them :)

Well, yes. :-) But I was specifically asking about the year-end count-up of total words, not on a per-project basis. The "this is what Project A came out to, wordwise" count-up is part and parcel of the writer's toolbox, business-wise.

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

I don't, no - it's never occurred to me to tot it up on a yearly basis, though like you, I run a subs spreadsheet and income/expenditure for my accountant. I wrote 2 novels this year and about a dozen short stories. That's enough of a total to keep note of, for me, rather than the word count, which fluctuates wildly on a project basis in any case, as I hack chunks out.

[ramblin-phyl.livejournal.com]

How do I track words when I write and rewrite, add, subtact, tweak, and do it all over again a year later when the editor gets back with reviisons?

I made each of my deadlines and made some money this year. That's what I track.

[debg.livejournal.com]

I don't generally total my wordcount for time. I total it to keep track of a given project. I'm more invested in the quality than the quantity.

The one time I've done the totalling for the "OMG NUMBERS" thing was because someone demanded to know when I slept, or ate, are did anything but write, and it didn't seem to me that I did all that much. So I totalled up the past (at the time) 2.4 years or so, and came up with nearly 750K worth of original fiction: five Kinkaids, two Haunted Ballads, a few short pieces, Truth in the Middle for "For Keeps".

I gather that a lot of writers do the "I wrote this many words in X time" thing as a self-disciplinary tool: it's the butt-in-chair thing. I don't have any trouble keeping the butt in the chair, so I don't bother, usually.

[kradical.livejournal.com]

I tallied up last year's word count because someone specifically asked. I included proposals and nonfiction, yeah, since the idea was the sum total of words.

I'm only tempted to do it again this year because I'm curious as to how '07 compares to '06.....

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Simple. Writing for me is a bit like mining: somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain are some fascinating stories. But I can't do anything with those stories, I can't even get at them, without putting them down onto paper, so wordcount is the process of generating ore. After I've got the words, then I can refine them into stories.

Word count is a metric of how much raw material I've generated before I can begin to create stories. If the ore is of especially low quality, I need to ask why and see where I need to take my mining operation (what experiences I need to have, what stories I need to read) to generate better quality, but the very first step is to generate the raw material of a story (as opposed to a blog entry, anecdote, stream of consciousness ramble, or whatever).

Besides, being a Linux geek, wordcount is a simple process. I could probably do it in one line, if I were so inclined.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

I count, because I have one of those brains which needs to feel traction on a task. If I can point at sixty thousand words on the year I can tell it we did in fact get things done. *g*

Then I can work some more.

[greeneyedkzin.livejournal.com]

Back to Boomerang. Don't tell me that cat's having a growth spurt. If he does and he starts grooming your ear, worry.

[lagilman]

If he gets any larger, I'm going to need an exotic animal permit, because he'll definitely have puma genes...

[greeneyedkzin.livejournal.com]

Oh, he's a darling. I want simply to pick him up and hug him.

You can have your insulin now.

[lagilman]

Excellent -- you can cat-sit!

(no actual sitting on cat needed, although they will attempt to sit on you...)

[ilvack.livejournal.com]

I've never kept track of my word count throughout the year. Mostly because it would be near impossible to do so.

I have the problem of writing about twenty different stories throughout the year. I'm constantly picking up new snatches of inspiration, throwing it down on whatever is handy at the time, playing with it until I feel like I've gotten everything out of it, and then moving onto something else.

It would just be a hassle to find every text document, every notebook, every loose leaf page and count them all up just so I could post it on my blog and say "THERE WORLD! HERE IS WHAT I'VE GIVEN UNTO THEE!".

Unless it was Robert Jordan, somehow writing from the grave. Now, I'd find THAT impressive.

[ferragus.livejournal.com]

You has Flavor!

[lagilman]

I is tuna?

(actually, the brat has a deep fondness for foie gras, thanks to agamisu, damn him. No, I do NOT let fur-face have any.)

[stephen-dedman.livejournal.com]

There's a year's-end tradition among Australian sf/f/h writers: Sean Williams totals the number of words of fiction he's had professionally published in the year, and we compare our own totals to The Sean. More recently, we've added The Scott (Westerfeld), for the number of books published in the year, and The Margo (Lanagan), the number of major awards published in the year.

That's the only time I do work out my total in numbers of words: normally, I just count the number of new stories published.