Author: Lee Lacaille-Xing

A guy who likes to write mainly speculative fiction.

NaNoWriMo 2022 Results

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Unsurprisingly, I won NaNoWriMo! I ended up writing 50,029 words overall and got a pretty good start to a new novel. Since I already went through my writing in Monday’s blog post, I won’t do that here.

What I didn’t mention in that post is that my writing this year was actually pretty irregular. There were two days where I didn’t write at all, one day where I wrote something like 20 words, and eleven where I wrote over 2k. There was even one day where I wrote 3797 words.

2022_11_nanowrimo

Above is the graph of my writing progress per day, from the NaNoWriMo website. You can sort of see the days where I attended write-ins, because they typically are the days when I write the most.

Writing Update: November 2022

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Writing has gone incredibly well this month. After not having written regularly for almost an entire year, I thought that getting back into it would be difficult. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. If anything, it’s been easy.

So easy, in fact, that I ran into the first moment where I was stumped and didn’t know to start the next chapter yesterday. It didn’t take me very long to figure out a solution to the problem – switching perspective to a different character a few chapters earlier than I had planned.

The quality of my prose, on the other hand, is actually pretty bad, since I’ve been focusing on getting the words down instead of trying to make anything look nice. It’s not really much of a problem since my writing style is pretty plain to begin with. I’ll just have to vary my word choice in future revisions so it isn’t obvious that I’m repeating certain phrases. Because that’s what I’ve been doing.

Even though it’s NaNoWriMo, I’ve come to the realization that I’ve written less than I could have. Not with regards to the typical NaNo filler or anything like that, but actual plot, worldbuilding, and character development. There’s an entire main character whose perspective I’ve completely ignored. Going back and adding in chapters from her point of view would actually help flesh out the world more. Things also happen too quickly in the first chapter, and expanding it into three chapters would help introduce the characters and their personalities a little better. That was my plan before NaNoWriMo started, but then I got impatient and wanted to jump right into the action.

The month isn’t quite over yet and I haven’t reached 50k yet, but it’s been great so far. I am actually having fun writing this story.

And no, I still haven’t managed to come up with a working title for it yet.

Views & visitors over the years

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Wednesday’s post had me wondering: just where do most of my readers come from, and has that changed significantly over the years?

I’ve been blogging since 2011, but there are a lot of deleted posts in the first few years of this blog. I don’t know if they’re counted in the stats, so I didn’t want to include them in any kind of analysis. 2020 is the first year I really started posting regularly, so that’s the first year I’m going to start with.

2020stats

2020 had a total of 959 views and 322 visitors. 146 of those views came from search engines. Surprisingly, the vast majority of it was Baidu (135), not Google (11). 119 views came from the WordPress reader, then some from Pillowfort and Twitter.

Aside from the home page, the pages for The Land of Two Moons and The Book of Immortality had the most views. I’m actually surprised that a couple of the LotM chapters were viewed enough that they showed up on the stats page.

As for where the viewers came from, it’s mostly the United States, followed by China, France, India, Germany, Switzerland, then Canada. I honestly was expecting more English-speaking countries. China makes sense, since that’s where most of the Baidu viewers came from.

2021stats1

2021 had a total of 3,498 views and 1,785 visitors, a gigantic jump from the previous year. Turns out that regular posts means more views. Unlike the previous year, most views came from the WordPress reader (302). A lot of people got here from search engines, particularly Google (95). Links from Pillowfort produced 45 views, and links from Twitter produced 38.

Like 2020, the most viewed “page” was the home page. After that, it was “creating a basic naming language” and “Nostalgia Time: Oekaki, Deviantart, & Old Internet Friends“. No one seems to have read any of the Book of Immortality or The Land of Two Moons chapters – at least not enough for it to show up here.

2021stats2

Where the viewers came from in 2021 makes a little more sense here – English-speaking countries make up the top four.

2022stats1

I know 2022 isn’t over, but I think I have enough data that things won’t change too significantly. Most views came from search engines, of which Google was predominant. A lot fewer people got here from the wordpress reader than they did in the previous year. I’m guessing it’s because so many people got here from googling “naming language” and getting to the most popular post, “Creating a basic naming language”. I’m also surprised to see that “Nostalgia Time: Oekaki, Deviantart, & Old Internet Friends” is still relatively popular.

2022stats2

As for where people came from…first place is the United States. And then second place is Unknown Region! I have no idea what this means. Did a large number of people start using location-blocking in 2022? I don’t particularly care where my viewers come from, but I don’t think I ever saw “Unknown Region” before 2022.

The most popular thing I’ve written

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I’ve mostly written about writing on this blog, so you’d assume that my most popular post would be about writing, right? As is turns out, that isn’t right at all. My most popular post is, in fact, about conlanging.

It is this post: Creating a basic naming language.

I imagine that some of the popularity comes from the fact that it is #3 on Google when you search “naming language”.

20221114_naminglanguagegoogle

I genuinely never expected to make it to the front page of Google. In fact, I never expected to make to any page of Google. But I actually get a lot of traffic from search engines, including Google – in fact, about three times as many people come here from various search engines than they do through the WordPress reader. Again, that’s not something I expected.

I’m curious if letting the domain name expire will have an effect on this. Guess I’ll know if traffic to that post suddenly drops in 2023. I won’t be too upset if it does. I imagine most people who find that post get disappointed that there aren’t more posts about conlanging on this blog and leave anyway.

But seeing this one post get more hits than anything else has had me thinking for the past few months. What if I write a sequel to it – a post on how to expand a naming language into a “full” conlang?

I think that’s what I’ll be doing in December this year.