Why I Don’t Write A Book (Because I’ve Written 12)
The cool word art on a Sri Lankan passport.
I was getting my passport and the lady asked what to list as occupation. I said writer. She said, ‘can you show me anything you’ve written?’ I wanted to point to a computer but I couldn’t see any. I write for papers but it’s not like I had any on me. So what to do. On my passport it doesn’t list any occupation at all. Someone recently asked me how much I write and I finally did a wordcount. I’ve published over 1.2 million words over ten years now. That’s War And Peace, twice.
Word count is obviously a lame metric. This blog isn’t War And Peace, there is no such depth of character and history here. The stuff I don’t write (personal stuff, emotional stuff) could fill a book, which would probably be more interesting. This blog isn’t drivel either, tho. It’s decent writing, usually. Some of it’s stuck in time, but some of it’s not. I think I’m getting better.
That’s 2,705 posts, with an average of 450 words each. Each post gets an average of 11 comments, or about 29,694 comments total. By the end of the year I should have 3,000 posts and 30,000 comments.
This year so far I’ve written an average of 26,000 words a month, or about 850 words a day. The grand total wordcount is 1,215,355, as of today. In that time this blog has served 2.4 million pages to 1.3 million visitors (stats).
An ‘average’ novel is like 100,000 words, which, again, isn’t really a measure of anything. But by that metric I’ve written like 12 novels worth over the past decade. I really should represent and get my passport changed. They can surely fit blogger in there.
Posted on Thursday, August 16th, 2012 in blogging, Personal.
Mohsin Hamid, author of How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia, has a nice 
I’m happy to be featured in Echelon magazine’s 40 Under 40 feature, profiling young people who contribute to the economy in some way, mainly in business but also in terms of innovation and thought leadership. It’s an interesting article not just in that I’m in it (mainly for work on indi.ca and 
I won’t add too much commentary, but just read I guess. The youngest Rajapaksa, Rohitha (Chi Chi) has given an amazing interview to the 
In 2009 this strange character appeared on the Sri Lankan Internet scene, getting angry, flaming, trolling whatever. Then he started naming anonymous bloggers, posting comments as people’s kids, nasty stuff, for which I removed him from 
Keep on writing, you are good at it. And if you have an inclination, write a book.
They might also open a file for you at the CID if you got yourself categorised under blogger. Better stick to writer.
I’ll tell you what’s wrong with your writing: you are too much of a pussy. Don’t get me wrong, (most of the time) you are are an interesting enough observationalist and there’s nothing wrong with your style–your short sentence structure is nimble and highly readable. But I don’t know why you do this, maybe because this is a blog, but you often tend to dilute your writing (and observations) with that urge to play for/please both sides, with countless maybe’s, ‘i dunno’s or ‘i guess’s etc. If you show more conviction and back up what you say with more balls, you will definitely come across as a better, more uncompromising ‘writer’, even though it might put you at more risk of being called out. Sure it’s a blog, but when you do it for too long, the bad habits of casual blogging carry over to your more serious writing as well. All great writers really believed in the truth of what they wrote. Or made it sound like they did, at least.
Your writings are OK. I hope that these will improve with your maturity as I see some of them are as just “adolescent thoughts”. That is not a big deal. We all are evolving as writers, plumbers doctors etc.