http://faerye.net/tag/statistics Posts tagged with "statistics" - Faerye Net 2008-08-26T11:26:58+00:00 Felicity Shoulders http://faerye.net/ http://faerye.net/post/paper-progress Paper progress 2008-08-26T11:26:58+00:00 2008-08-26T11:26:58+00:00 <p>I&#8217;ve been meaning to take this photo since I graduated in June:</p> <center><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/faerye/2799926525/" title="writing notebooks by Eilonwy Anne, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3067/2799926525_a1db86f20d.jpg" width="500" height="404" alt="writing notebooks" border="0" /></a></center> <p>I admit, this may require explanation. These are my writing notebooks. Almost all of my fiction is written longhand in the first draft (though if I get stuck at the end I start typing it in &mdash; which may explain weak endings on a lot of second drafts!) and my medium of choice is the <a href="http://www.peartreepens.com/Clairefontaine-Cloth-Bound-Notebook-French-Ruled-p/c69741.htm" target="links">French-ruled Clairefontaine notebook</a>. This pile contains writing from July 1998 to yesterday, and the strip of blue batik marks the span of grad school.</p> <p>This is my way of communicating what an effect grad school has had on me, on my productivity alone. In the two years and a bit between June 10, 2006 and June 28, 2008, just my longhand compositions fill 346 pages. In school, 173 pages of rough a year, instead of the (hmm, hmm, carry the 2) 79 pages a year I averaged 1998-2006 (much of it <span class="caps">RPG</span> backstory and in-character journal.)</p> <p>This is just one way to measure. It doesn&#8217;t count the things I type as a first draft &mdash; much of Faerye Net falls in that category &mdash; or tell you how much of that raw material I used in subsequent drafts. But it does tell you how profoundly grad school transformed my habits. It forced me to think of myself as a writer.</p> <p><em><font size="1">Let&#8217;s see, since June 28 I&#8217;ve used 123 pages, divide by 2, multiply by 12, 720 pages a year&#8230;apparently being done with grad school has been good for productivity as well. Except 60 of those pages are in the last two weeks&#8230;I&#8217;m tempted to make a graph.</font></em></p>