The lesson in the word count

I learned something interesting today. A friend just finished writing over 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo (yay, Armelle!), and in cheering for her, I took a mind to count the number of words I’ve written this month in posting every day. Turns out I wrote 25,174 words this month (not counting this post), which is pretty impressive since I didn’t set myself a word count goal, just an intention to post daily.

What you don’t know is that I had a secret sub-goal. I also aimed to post once/day to one of two non-public blogs. Yeah, I’m still shy about certain parts of me being seen, what can I say.

So of those 25K+ words,  I wrote 5,021 here (not including today), 7,753 over here, and 12,400 somewhere else that is even more secret. That’s over 4 times as many words written somewhere else as I wrote here. Wow. Quite eye opening for me.

Also today I read this post, and it reminded me of this post. Both of those are such vivid descriptions of how things get in my world sometimes, but I avoid writing about it. Reading those posts brought tears to my eyes because they reminded me I’m not alone.

The connection is: those 20K+ words I didn’t share with y’all here? What if even a few of them helped someone else feel less alone with their problems? Can I get over my… shyness is not the word. It’s fear. Fear of being judged or analyzed or ridiculed. But if I could somehow, not conquer the fear, but allow it to exist and possibly think about moving if not past then around it, if I could allow myself to be more open here, what might that be like? Would something I write help someone feel less alone someday? I’d like that.

Another thought I had? I bet I could totally write 50,000 words in a month if I was trying. It’s entirely possible that the act of trying would make the words dry up, and instead I would just sterilize my entire house in avoidance of writing every day, but hey, that might not be so bad either. It’s definitely something to consider. If only I had a story I wanted to write as a novel!