The Spoons That Are My Ears!

I have just saved everything I've ever written onto an MP3 player which doubles as a memory stick. Actually it's not everything, just all my completed fiction from my earliest surviving tale to my most recent. Almost 20 years of relentless activity stored (with plenty of room to spare) inside a black tubular thing no longer than one of my fingers. Incredible! I did a word count at the same time and learned that so far I've written 1,824,485 words of fiction.

I am often described as 'prolific' but a simple calculation reveals that the above figure divided by my current total of finished tales (468 and rising fast) gives an average of 3898 words for each story. This can be extrapolated into the future. I plan to write exactly 1000 stories in my lifetime, so the grand total at the end of my career should be about 3,898,472 words. Almost four million words. In other words only about 10% of the total of Max Brand.

It's amusing to note that although my entire output easily fits inside a small memory stick, it is still larger than another uncompleted work: the Meridian Quay Tower, the tallest building in Swansea. An assertion proved by this photograph!