I was getting the feeling lately that I’ve been writing a lot here lately, and I already had an export of all of my blog posts, so I decided to check my word count each year over the last 8 years. As of yesterday, I’d written 167,824 words for this site in 2024. It turns out that’s a ton! Apparently I wrote my ass off in 2020 (187,535 words), but this year is on pace to overtake it by a lot. If I keep up this pace, I’ll get up to around 220,000 words, a record by a mile.

But like, why?

I think it’s the new More Birchtree subscription…it’s changing me! Now on the one hand, it’s gotten me to think about interesting, longer form pieces to write each week, but it’s also made me more intent on writing a lot of free posts as well. I know how freaking annoying it is when you follow a site and it seems like all the good stuff is behind a paywall, so I’ve really tried to make an effort to make this site something you can enjoy whether you subscribe or not. Maybe that’s not good business and I should withhold more, but I don’t know, I kinda suck at hard-nosed business practices.

Anyway, it was really something seeing that I’ve written just over 1 million words in less than a decade, so thanks for reading whatever fraction of those you have over the years. ❤️