How I Write - 2025 By The Numbers

Earlier today (actually, about ten minutes ago) I did the last little bit of drafting for this year, working on Project VAULT. I'd planned to finish on Friday 19th December, but when I updated my spreadsheets I noticed that I was very close to precisely doubling last year's word count, so of course I had to try and hit that. And I did, over a couple of extra sessions just before and just after Christmas.

So, with the pen and keyboard officially laid down for the year, it's time for my end-of-year numbers post!

This is the fourth year I've written about the quantified aspects of my writing. Here's the previous three years - 2022, 2023, 2024.

These posts very consistently get a lot of traffic (people are apparently fascinated by word counts and the mechanics of achieving them), so I'm hoping another year of my personal anecdata will be a useful read for other writers and readers curious about how the sausage gets made. In particular, I'm hopeful this post will be useful for debut writers (as I was for some of last year and all of this year) trying to figure out how to manage the dual-aspect job of writing and publishing.

Caveat Writer

I repeat this in every post of this type, because I believe it's essential to do so. These posts are not a baseline, yardstick or benchmark for this kind of work. I don't write these posts to issue a challenge, enjoy a humblebrag or to hand my fellow writers sticks to beat themselves with. I am fortunate enough to have many advantages - stable employment with no commute, good physical and mental health and supportive family. My life isn't stress or challenge-free, but what I do have to manage is within my ability to do so and I have the flexibility and support to make changes quickly when I need to. That's not true for everyone, which means my raw numbers are a poor way of judging or monitoring your personal progress.

I post these numbers posts as a form of accountability for myself and a data point for those trying to work out their own sustainable writing practices. Please take what might work for you too and ignore anything that doesn't. I will talk a bit in this post about how I changed my time management and routines and how that led to a reassuring growth in my working capacity after last year's slightly worrisome dip. But again, this is a reference, not a guide.

What got written?

This year I've worked on four different novels and zero short fiction over the course of the year. That was more novel work (again) than last year and a complete collapse in the short work. I also spent some time working on outlines, pitches and other ancillary activities, but a lot less than last year, which was a relief. I was disappointed that I didn't manage any short fiction this year - that's something I hope to change in 2026.

• The first quarter of the year was a single, glorious drafting session, working exclusively on the first draft of PROJECT SCARLET (as it was known at the time) which is now available for pre-order as SOLITARY AGENTS. After so much of last year was chopped into little bits by a combination of publishing activities, procrastination and my own uncertainty, it was an absolute joy to just write for a solid three months. I finished the draft of SOLITARY AGENTS in mid-March.
• I had a quick break during the third week of March (mainly to just let my brain reset a bit) and worked on edits for PROJECT SHARD, preparing it to go to my agent. Once that was done, I jumped back onto SOLITARY AGENTS and worked on it steadily until the end of May, when I handed it in to my editor and had a celebratory pizza - my second novel was (for now) done and dusted.
• In early June, with a lot on the calendar and not much time for writing, I occupied myself with writing pitches for new books, polishing up an outline for something called Project DRIFT, then going to Capital Crime and the Bloody Scotland launch. This was the start of an incredibly busy summer, but I did manage to take ten days off in Sweden, which was delightful. Around this time A RELUCTANT SPY came out in paperback and we were finally able to announce it had been shortlisted for both the McDermid Debut Award and the Bloody Scotland Debut Prize. With all the excitement, June was a pretty light month for word count.
• For most of July, I worked on the outline and opening scenes of Project DRIFT. It was very nice to be working on something new (and not a spy novel to boot) and it kept me occupied nicely as I fretted my way towards the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate. Then I won the McDermid Debut Award and suddenly found everything quite difficult to concentrate on.
• Feeling a bit fried, I took a burnout break in early August. I have learned, through trial and error, not to try and push through when I'm feeling a particular combination of enervation and tension. I was also very busy at work and dealing with stressful things elsewhere, so the break was essential. Sometimes knowing when to stop is as useful and effective as knowing when to keep going.
• A week or so into August, my editor came back with first round edits on SOLITARY AGENTS. Thankfully the first draft was pretty good structurally, so it was a cleanup/refinement edit rather than a wholesale redraft or heavy reworking. I spent the next three weeks doing that, finishing just before the end of August and using the last few days of the month to write some more pitches. If there's one thing I do a lot of now, it's continuously writing up pitchable ideas - something about getting a barebones query-style pitch on paper, sometimes with some additional notes and/or a basic outline, really neutralises the distraction factor and allows me to carry on with my primary projects. Plus it is very useful to have a bank of ideas sitting there, ready to go.
• For most of September, I worked on Project DRIFT again, notching up 11,000 words or so. In the middle of the month I went to Bloody Scotland, where I found myself the gobsmacked winner of the Bloody Scotland Debut Prize. The press activity and distraction factor of that month was high (we did a lot of podcasts and I was on BBC Radio as well, which is still wild to me), but I managed to keep plugging away on DRIFT right to the end of the month.
• In October, my copyedits came back on SOLITARY AGENTS, so I spent a week very carefully re-reading my book and reviewing the copyeditor's comments, then packed those off to my editor and went back to DRIFT again until I took a week off for my birthday in late October/early November.
• From mid-November until mid-December, I spent about four weeks outlining and then structuring Project VAULT in Scrivener, as well as writing a bunch of backstory notes. I finally got going on the draft exactly halfway through December, finishing up earlier today with just over 10,000 words of the novel in hand.

How did I work?

This is Year 7 of my regular writing routine (Monday to Friday, 06:15-07:45) so I won't go over my daily routine, especially as it's about to change. I'm planning to write a new rundown of my writing routine in late January or February because it is going to change fairly drastically for the first time since I started working this way, as I'm going down to four days a week at my day job to allow both more time for writing and publishing work and, frankly to let me balance things a bit more healthily. I cannot wait and I'm very excited to see what impact it has on me and my writing.

Back to this year though - the one thing that seriously differed from last year was consistency. I had more on my plate than last year when it comes to events, panels, ancillary writing and publishing work and so on. But when I sat down to write, I (usually, most of the time) actually did write, unlike last year when I spent a great deal of time frantically spinning my wheels to little benefit.

Although I only actually finished one book this year, I worked on four, getting two books to the point of publication readiness and clocking in a combined 40,000 words or so on two more.

It's Metric Time

Okay, let's get down to brass tacks. As usual, my records aren't always completely precise. I sometimes lose track of time when I'm writing, or forget to track a day of work and have to reverse-engineer it from the next day's word count. However, I'm reasonably confident that the error bars on these totals are again around 5% plus or minus the actual numbers.

Writing time

In 2025, I wrote for about 357.1 hours. I'm reasonably sure this is accurate, though I suspect it's actually a slight over-count, as I rounded up the odd 1hr 10m session to the full 90 minutes. It is, though, ten hours less than last year. Only a bit over a working day and a half's difference, though I suspect rounding down to, say, 345 or 350 hours might be more accurate.

That's 14 rounded twenty-four hour days of the year, or about 51 seven-hour working days. So, again, about 1.7 months of work, on top of my day job. Again, I haven't directly tracked the enormous spike in non-writing publishing work, i.e. all the stuff that doesn't create new words of fiction, but which is required to sell books. I thought about adding a separate section to this report to specifically track that kind of thing, but I'd be estimating by going back through my calendar, which doesn't capture everything. As a rough yardstick, I can tell you I did nearly thirty podcasts and events in 2025, wrote a half dozen guest articles, blog posts and newspaper interview responses and spent an inordinate amount of time writing near-daily blog posts and newsletters. I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if that doubled my working time for the year.

I did something actually-writing related on 227 days of this year, which is 12 fewer days than last year. I spent 98 days drafting new work this year, which is nearly three times as much drafting as last year. Editing accounted for 75 days, nearly half as many as last year. The remainder of the year was roughly split between ideas and outline writing (44 days), career admin (8 days) and marketing work (2 days).

Drafting

This is where the rubber meets the road for me. Last year I was completely dismayed to reach the end of the year with my drafting totals having been cut in half. This year I was determined to get back to somewhere near my 'typical' output of 150,000 to 200,000 words a year. And, indeed, when I 'finished' writing for the year I noticed I was less than 4,000 words away from doubling last year's word count. So I snuck in a couple of extra days, determined to hit that milestone.

That meant that, as of an hour ago, I've written 166,753 words of aggregate new fiction - double last year's word count (plus 135 words). More than half of that was on SOLITARY AGENTS - 110,836 words, to be precise. The rest was split between the other three novels - around 40,000 on Project DRIFT, 12,000 on Project VAULT and just under 3,000 on Project SHARD.

Editing

Editing was weirdly consistent with last year - I cut 33,424 words this year, only a little more than last year. Nearly all of that editing was line-by-line edits on SOLITARY AGENTS and SHARD. As with nearly all of my projects, I routinely overwrite by about 15-20% and then trim down, which is exactly what happened again this year, with these books.

Min-Maxing

My shortest writing session was once again about 30 minutes. I tend to round to the nearest half-hour, so I suspect I had one or two that were more like twenty minutes. The least I wrote in a drafting session was four (4) words. I think that session was one where I wrote a couple of hundred words after also cutting a couple of hundred words in the same session. Pretty sure I didn't actually have a writing session where I wrote four words. At least, I hope not.

I had thirty-six sub-500 word drafting days in the year, which is twenty-nine more than last year. Most of these were days where I was fiddling with outlines or doing minor edits.

My longest writing session was four and a half hours. My highest single day word count was an excellent 5,835 words on the last day of drafting SOLITARY AGENTS (the same day as the max writing time). I had three other 3,000+ word days, which is not quite back to the highs of 2022 and 2023, but is a lot better than last year.

Averages and consistency

I still don't work to word count targets, but I do record them, and I do use Pacemaker to plan out my work and ensure I'm roughly on track to meet my now very real and very regular deadlines.

Averaged out, my daily word count is 735 words (double last year). My median is 1,157 (nearly triple last year). My average words-per-hour over the year is 467 (again about double last year).

For the fourth year running, a large majority of my drafting days were somewhere between 750 and 1,200 words, which is in the ballpark of my previous averages, though slightly lower. Averages, medians and so on are tricksy, but I think it's fair to say that I spent slightly less time drafting this year, but when I was focused I wrote more words per hour.

It's not surprising that writing more words on average, even with slightly fewer words and hours spent writing, is going to result in a higher overall word count. But I'm still very pleased that the effort I've put in this year has paid off.

What about previous years?

Here's a quick, topline rundown of the headline numbers for the last four years.

• 2025 - 357 hours, 166,753 words drafted, 33,424 words cut
• 2024 - 366 hours, 83,309 words drafted, 29,852 words cut
• 2023 - 426 hours, 177,140 words drafted, 63,516 words cut
• 2022 - 404 hours, 201,478 words drafted, 52,057 words cut

If the previous year's lessons were consistency (or, in the case of last year, lack thereof) then I think this year's overriding lesson is balance. I worked about the same amount in pure time terms, but I spent less of the year absolutely fried and spinning my wheels and more of it actually typing. And the results are plain.

Lessons and plans

Once more, it's useful to peer backwards and take a look at where I was this time last year, and what I wanted to do with 2025. Here's the relevant part:

So how am I going to approach next year? I have a three-fold plan. Compartmentalise, Plan and Deliver.

I won't reiterate the specifics of that plan (check last year's post if you want to read them) but that is, in fact, broadly what I did. I was far, far better about firewalling the work of publishing from the work of producing words. They are related and closely interlinked, but in my experience if they're not kept as separate as possible in your mind, time and efforts, each can trip the other up, badly.

Second, I made a plan for the whole year which I mostly followed. At the very least I was realistic about what I'd be working on and when. And I was able to take full advantage of most of the gaps and cracks in the year, instead of frittering them away.

Lastly, I delivered, pretty consistently. I didn't faff for weeks or months at a time, with the exception of the three or four weeks before I started working on Project VAULT, when I was feeling a bit burned out and uncertain about the direction of the book and spent probably longer than I should have fiddling with my outline. But mostly, I got on with it.

This was a huge morale boost after last year. And it was a reassurance that I was on the right track and building a foundation for a long-term, sustainable writing and publishing career, balancing two very different kinds of work effectively.

As I noted above, next year will see a pretty substantial change for me, as I go down to four days a week with my (wonderful and incredibly supportive) day job. From January 5th, I'll work Monday to Thursday, with one full day a week to spend on writing and publishing work. I'm very hopeful about how that's going to make compartmentalisation a little easier, enable me to try new types of writing, draft more and edit faster. I'm going to write a more in-depth daily routine post about how that works (and how I did the maths on this decision in the first place) early next year, once I have an idea how those goals are going to pan out.

But I'm also very keen to use this time to continue balancing my life and work more effectively. I've been skirting perilously close to burnout the last couple of years, even with the improvements I made in 2025. It's not so much pure working hours or weight of deadlines. It's more the feeling of never not working (or guiltily procrastinating while thinking about how I should be working) and always, always, always feeling like I'm not doing quite enough.

I'm very hopeful that this new time being freed up will let me do good writing, do a decent and effective amount of promotional and publishing work and take some actual days off that don't include writing blogs, making Instagram reels, drafting newsletters, outlining, fiddling with spreadsheets or refreshing my Amazon author portal over and over again.

Final thoughts

This is my fourth year of writing this annual roundup. In many ways, it was an absolute peak year, finishing my first full year as a published author, winning awards, going to festivals, and, as we've seen above, managing to write in the midst of it all.

I'm very proud that I managed to do that, though at times it felt like it took an unsustainable amount of effort (see above re: burnout). I'm getting better at recognising those moments of oncoming overwhelm and stepping out when I need to, taking breaks and balancing everything. And I'll continue to do that. At least part of it is conscious self-monitoring, journalling and talking to my friends, family and fellow writers about how I'm feeling.

One of the greatest gifts of the past two or three years especially has been the number of new and close friends I've made. It's a common belief that there are seasons in your life where you'll make the majority of your close connections (school, university, your first few jobs) after which it's a slow diminishment into middle age and steadily fewer friends. Well, I'm here to tell you, having a shared passion (and a lot of things to talk and occasionally whinge about) is an amazing way to meet people and subvert that common and depressing expectation. And I couldn't write what I write or do what I do without the people around me who encourage, support and balance me out when I'm spinning like a top. I try to do the same for them and it's a deeply rewarding and encouraging new part of my life.

2025 was a year that I came into with a fair bit of trepidation and shaky confidence that I'd be able to meet my personal and writing goals. I also got thrown a lot of curve balls, most of them incredibly positive, a few pretty tough. If I'd known what was coming I'd have been equal parts terrified and anxiously excited. But what mattered, in the end, was putting my head down and plugging away.

I can't wait to dive into my new novel next year, which is 10,000 words in and starting to coalesce in really interesting ways. And I'm fascinated to discover what it's going to be like to have every single Friday to work on the greatest passion of my life.

But first, I'm going to enjoy some actual time off and probably play quite a lot of PS5, while steadily demolishing our Christmas leftovers.

If you're a writer, I hope you had a good year too. And if you didn't, then I'd invite you to take a look at last year's post as evidence that it's possible to badly miss your goals, suffer periods of doubt and overwhelm and anxiety, but still work your way back steadily to where you want to be.

See you in 2026!

If this post was interesting for you, or you have any questions or comments, I'd love to hear them over on Bluesky or Instagram.