“You’re so wordy!”

That’s one of my husband’s favorite sayings when we’re talking about my writing, and he’s not wrong. I’ve written and published a lot of words.

And this is something that comes up in interviews I’ve done frequently, usually in one of two forms. The first is the question, “When did you decide to start writing?” The second is often, “How many words have you written total?”

I can’t fully answer the second question without addressing the first, because the when of the first will (hopefully) explain the why of the second.

“When did you decide to start writing?”

Over the years, I’ve learned to counter the interviewers’ question with “Do you want to know when I decided to write, or when I decided to publish?” For me, those are two very different things.

I’m not sure “deciding” to write was ever a conscious decision on my part. When I was in second grade (so 7 or 8 years old), my teacher introduced us to writing stories. My writing journey began as a series of school assignments, most featuring my brother or younger cousins in some way, but it quickly evolved into me writing other stories for fun. I kept a notebook (which I no longer have) and wrote a range of short pieces involving everything from paper airplanes to a ghost in our basement to random musings about my day (which, at that age, weren’t very profound.)

My writing “hobby” continued through middle school, high school, and into college, but I never looked into publishing during those years. It was always something I wanted to pursue, but school was my focus. And later, my career took precedence. But I never stopped writing.

If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know about the Infinity Publishing fiasco. I’m not going to go into detail in this post, but that was kind of my first foray into publishing. Back in 2008, indie publishing was in its infancy, and in our defense, we didn’t know what to look for—and what to avoid. Long story short, that experience was not good. (You can read all about it here: A Cautionary Tale of a Vanity Press and later, The Battle is Over.)

It took me another 12 years before I gathered the courage to look into publishing again. And without the events of 2020, I’m not sure I would have made the time to do it. At the beginning of 2020, I was querying The Caein Legacy to agents, seeking a trad deal, since I was understandably hesitant to try indie publishing again. But things had changed significantly since 2008, and when the lockdowns hit in March of 2020, I found myself stuck at home for almost 3 months before my workplace started allowing the laboratory personnel back on site regularly. During those 3 months, I didn’t have much to do other than be “present online,” so I started looking into indie publishing again.

I continued to query The Caein Legacy while I learned more about the other options available. I decided that summer to pull out the completed manuscript of Hunted (which I hadn’t queried due to its length, well over the typical “accepted” word count most agents will accept.) Hunted was published as an experiment. Yes, there were some mistakes made with that project, but they were valuable in that I learned a ton.

And that experience gave me the confidence to go back to Infinity and get my rights back for my Relics of War trilogy. I’d rewritten the trilogy by that time (again), but needed the rights back to republish the new version solo. And when the trilogy started doing pretty well, I made the decision to stop querying The Caein Legacy and publish that series myself too. It’s a decision I do not regret.

And here we are, 11 books and 2 short stories later.

“So, how many words have you written total?”

Knowing the history of my writing journey, I can honestly say that I have no idea. I have handwritten pages and notebooks from the years I was writing prior to me having regular access to a computer. I have more files on my computer of projects that I’ve started and stopped for one reason or another, and more that come from early versions of books that I’ve since rewritten.

Whatever the true number of words is, I can say this: It’s a lot. And I don’t have the patience to figure it out.

About a year and a half ago, my husband asked me how many words I’d published. I didn’t know, but that was something I could easily figure out. And so, this little spreadsheet was born:

The lines in purple are the items I’ve published. Those in white are books I’ve completed and plan to publish in the future. A couple of the titles are short stories belonging to anthologies/short story collections. Some of the word counts of unpublished works will undoubtedly change as revisions/edits ensue.

This list is the best I can do without days (or maybe weeks) of work trying to figure out the true number of words I’ve written in my life time. And if I were to also include my blog posts, well… That number would be even higher.

So when my husband walks into the room and says, “You’re so wordy!” I can’t really argue with him. He’s right (just don’t tell him I said that.)