On Having Written Over 2 Million Words
Turns out, I’ve written over 2 million words here on the Daily SPUF. That’s a lot of words. Like, I can barely comprehend a million words, let alone two million. Really, a million of anything is a huge number. One million seconds is equal to about 11 and a half days, a week and a half nearly. And that’s just seconds, a very small unit of measurement. On top of that, the Daily SPUF itself recently passed the 3 million word mark, meaning I’ve written a third of this blog’s content, and that discrepancy is only going to get bigger over time.
And blimey, I’ve written a lot of crap. I’ve written multiple articles on a single thread on the old SPUF forums. I actually forgot that, for a while after the old itsurblog posts died in the TF2 subforum, I kinda accidentally made another one in the TFC subforum. Most of the time, I only remember I’ve written these things because of two reasons: Either I’ve done a search for them because I feel like I’ve written them before, or I’ve just been hitting the Random! button on the home page.
Really though, is 2 million words a lot? Okay, yes, it genuinely is, but at the same time, the Daily SPUF is over 10 years old, and we’ve published an article every single day apart from September 19th 2013, when aabicus was busy updating the site and we didn’t really have an automated system of backlogged articles ready to go yet. Rumour has it, if you go to the page where the September 19th article would have been, you’ll be hit by a terrible curse. Really though, you’ll just get hit with a 404 message.
Either way, over the course of 10 years, that only really averages out to 700 words per article, spread out over 2.7k articles. Still impressive, but, given enough time, it’s kinda not really? I dunno, I think if anyone set aside time to write a minimum of 500 words a day, they could do it.
Thing is, that’s just here on the Daily SPUF. I went and installed the word count plugin I use on the Phoviverse, my fictional writing website, and, well, it turns out, I’ve written 1.7 million words there too. Although, looking at the stats, I’m not surprised by what the longest articles are. Two of them are Inktober articles with way too much backstory, followed by a couple of articles detailing background things: namely the original Dessaron tale from MK3 and the Races of the Phoviverse, which contains descriptions of of all 12 of the MK5 Phoviverse species. The top post is a collection of writing prompts which technically should be split into 5 separate posts, but oh well. Weirdly though, the next 5 top articles are split between really new MK5 stuff and really, really old MK3 stuff.
But are any of those 2 million words (okay maybe 3.7 million words now) worth reading? Maybe? I will admit I have written some shit over the years, but I do think my writing has improved a bit. If I am writing something I care about, I’ll write for ages and not worry about things, the words just fall out of me. However, if I’m trying to just fill space, like I am currently, well, I do tend to ramble.
Some of it is definitely being read though. While a huge amount of our traffic has disappeared (or is not being reported, I don’t know), there is a consistent trickle of readers. That being said, most of them tend to go for the handful of nude articles that Google allows people to visit.
Although, if I am really honest, I am kinda scraping the bottom of the barrel now. I’ve written a multitude of articles on this very subject now, and it’s just going to get worse. But, to be fair, how much CAN you write for a milestone article without repeating yourself?