So it’s been just over three weeks since I planned to dedicate 3 hours a week on my academic writing.  A quick calculation tells me that I should have put in 9 hours on task….I should be so lucky.  January picked up where December ended, 50 plus hour weeks for the last three weeks due to a hard deadline of 29th January.  So, the hours intended for my academic writing were channelled elsewhere – this is always what happens.

The work I was focused on was completed and delivered by the due date, bar the final reference list, and that is on my ‘to do’ list for today.  Which sort of gives the hint that some form of writing has been taking place.  The ramping up of my work hours in November, December and January has been the result of having to create the teaching materials for an online course that I teach on.  ‘Teach on’ here maybe a stretch far because teaching on this course is delivered entirely through the written word rather than me lecturing live in any format, and so all I have been doing in these long hours is writing, writing, and more writing.  Oh my, have I been writing, just not the writing I hoped and planned for.

Now that the work, in its first draft, has been delivered I have been reflecting back on the words produced.  Since the start of material production in mid-November I have written circa 60,000 words.  These words have been produced over and above all other tasks expected of me on the ‘work’ daily, so when I work out the actual time input for this large writing task it has taken a total of 6 full time hours weeks of work – on top of what I have to do.

The average novel runs anywhere between 70 to 100k, similar figures hold true for academic books, whilst a journal article (depending on Journal) can run anywhere between 6000 to 10,000 words.  Given these figures, if I was working on my own writing tasks, then my 60k of words should have me around 85% of the way through a novel or academic book pitched at the lower end of the word count, or around 7 journal article manuscripts to the good, working on a 8K average (which would actually be less coherently strung together writing as the references are included in the count.) 

It would be great if I could produce that amount of writing in such a short period of time, but without having anything else to do.  The words were produced at the expense of my physical health.  I now appear to have a permanent head cold, headache, and stress induced cough which is keeping me up at night and feeds the headache.  Suffice to say, I find myself close to burnout at the start of Semester 2, when in an ideal world I should be facing into the teaching term feeling refreshed.

Burnout notwithstanding though, the words produced are an achievement.  Not quite what I had hoped for, either for #AcrWriMo 2023 or the 2024 writing goals, but an achievement nonetheless.