2,265,000

In which I add up all the words I've written in my creative life....

2,265,000

That’s the number of words I’ve written during my writing life (well, not including job words, teaching/lecture words, emails, letters, grocery lists, etc. etc.). These are my creative words.

This number of 2,265,000 includes 12 novels (estimated at 90K each), and 160 published stories (I write long now, so 5K each feels like a good average. I’ve also written 108 stories that have not been published. By “stories,” I also mean essays and even a couple of poems. Some of my stories were also published in my books, so I subtracted an estimate of those words to find my total.

As for the books, I’ve published 2 collections of short stories and 3 novels, or 4 if you count a novel published serially in an app that no longer exists (which I did). I have 4 novels that are and will remain unpublished, and 2 novels that are complete and looking for a happy home. I’ve written 1,080,000 words in books.

No wonder I’m tired? No wonder I sometimes wonder what can be left to say?

I’ve kept the records of my stories’ submission history in a very old-school plastic box of index cards since 1984 or so. And I imagine no better use for my Substack era than to dive into some of these stories and cards and journals to discover…I don’t know. Age-old gossip? Fancy editors who were nice to a young writer? Funny coincidences? Forgotten sentences? Themes to a life spent scribbling then typing then word processing then choosing PC or Apple?

I started sending out bad poetry to lit journals when I was in ninth grade or so—which was audacious and educational. (And a way to make some money, actually, in teen magazines.) But for this little project, I’ll focus on what happened after grad school, with my MFA in hand.

I’m not going to be all chronological about everything, but I would like to start with what I consider my first “real” publication of a short story: not a student lit magazine, not a teen publication, but the (still!) impressive South Carolina Review! And it’s nice to know that The South Carolina Review is still published today.

Observations:

~I was published with Joyce Carol Oates!

~Look at all those men on the masthead!

~Spooky coincidence: the name of my first husband is Robb, and his mother’s name is Marilyn!

~This story was NOT part of my graduate thesis, and I’m not sure why. Apparently, I submitted a version of this story to my undergrad English Department awards competition and got $100. It’s funny to think I was writing about ex-wives while an undergrad, but I guess that was a good disguise for the insecure jealousy I was feeling about my boyfriend at the time.

~All in all, I sent a version of this story to 9 places before The South Carolina Review said yes. Quite a bit of submission chaos, as I sent it to The New Yorker as well as to a journal called Telescope. I sent about everything to The New Yorker! Why the hell not, was my thinking then, I’m on my way to becoming a famous writer!