I realized yesterday that I have now completed eight novels: two of them published, one en route to publication, one in need of substantial revision before it could be sold, one not worth trying to sell anymore, and three that I’d love to see in print someday.

Assuming a ballpark average of about a hundred thousand words for each novel, that gets you to 800K words. (In reality, it’s more like 858K.)

I mentioned before the “million words of crap” notion, the idea that you have to practice to get good. Well, yesterday’s realization got me wondering how many words I’ve written since I first started writing well enough to seek publication. And it turns out that if you add up everything I’ve sold, everything I had enough faith in to submit but ended up retiring without selling it, and everything I could probably sell if I got off my butt and revised it like I’ve been meaning to do, then I have written 1,018,970 words of completed and theoretically publishable fiction.

Huh.

So I’ve written my million words of crap, and another million of hopefully-not-crap. Only counting the stuff that I completed, of course — there’s many more words locked in unfinished stories.

I wonder what the next million will bring?