Judging by my statistics, which never cease to amaze me both in their descriptive and prescriptive power, by early next summer there will have been a million and a half words behind me. Right now, I am only about sixty-thousand words short of that vaunted number. An inane achievement, to be sure, but an achievement nevertheless. Not in writing, I hasten to add. Not in art, to put it somewhat more precisely. Or cautiously. It is an achievement in tenacity. Or pig-headedness, to use a more baroque term. Or faith, if I may be allowed an innocent bit of precautious pomposity. Perhaps there is another half a million words left in me. Or a million. Or perhaps even a million and a half. Yes, indeed. Which would put me almost exactly midway through my writing, as it were, career. My half-life. Judging by my statistics once again, doubling the number of words would take me a couple of decades at most, perhaps my fair lot. Another decade on top would not make any great difference, anyhow. To be fair, neither did the first one of the three decades so far. But why so many words? That is, why as many as three million of them? Sadly, the explanatory power of my statistics, or any statistics for that matter, is zilch.

Addendum (March 21, 2020)

I chuckled when I came across this piece on one of my random peregrinations through my writings. As luck would have it, it took me about a decade to double the number of words boasted about in this piece (“A Three-Million-Words Man,” December 16, 2014). Ever since, though, I have been doing everything in my power never to become a four-million-words man (“My Five-Year Plan,” December 29, 2016). To my chagrin, I may well reach that awesome number of words by 2025, if not even earlier (“The Word Count,” June 24, 2019). And I certainly hope never to go much farther with my writing project beyond that year (“Nifty Numbers,” March 1, 2016). In other words, my true half-life in terms of this piece would fall in 2010, when I reached two-million words (“Word Count, Again and Again,” September 20, 2010). Alas, I was sixty-four back then, and I will be seventy-nine in five years! Returning to this piece one more time, I was still kind of young and naïve when it was penned. Goodness gracious, I was no more than fifty-nine years old! Looking back, I cannot by wave my hand dismissively at my erstwhile age. Silly youngster!