Two-thirds of a Million Words

I did some cleanup of my writing folder recently. Originally, it was just one big folder, most stories of any length as one file, with a few that had pictures or something having extra files. The posted ones also have a second file with certain things modified from the way my editor writes them to what works well to post here. I also had a table of contents for the whole folder, summarizing the content of the stories, and, after I started posting here, marking which ones were posted. A few larger stories with more files (especially the ones I split up into many chapters for posting) started getting subfolders. The complicated ones (Normal and Ethertravelers) have tables of contents for the subfolders. Those are complicated because they exist as separate original files for most of the stories, rather than one long story, and there are alternate versions for some of them.

I decided that, with the amount of content I have posted, this system needed more organization. I made a separate "posted" folder for stories that have been posted. And I went back through my posted stories here, adding links to them and word counts to the separate tables of contents for the posted files.

Because of that, I know now that my total work published here has recently passed two-thirds of a million words. It's actually 672,411, by Drupal's counting; my own word counts are slightly different. Since Jody's most recent part was only 3993 words, this means that I actually passed the milestone on the post before last, but I'm almost exactly in the middle of Jody's Story, so this is a good point to survey where I am.

I know that some authors here are a lot more prolific than that. Heck, Bike alone has several times that many words. But it's also probably a lot more words than many authors here might think they could ever write.

While Jody's been getting posted, I did some maintenance on some of the early stories, including all of Normal. Back when they were posted, I was less attentive to certain details. I made several grammar and spelling fixes in those stories.

I studied Normal more in depth because some of the stories I am preparing to post are a continuation for that story. In order to write these stories in a way consistent with the posted ones, I needed to reread my own work and write up a canon of established facts and a character list. In doing so, I also fixed up a few continuity errors in those stories: There was an origin story in the book page which differed in some details from the more detailed one Fred and Frieda recited at the celebration in chapter 8. I hadn't intended for them to be unreliable narrators. Since nobody called me out on it, I decided to make the version in chapter 8 official and changed the book page. The other continuity errors were really minor; for example, in chapter 3, the historical home of the ghost and her mother was in two different cities in Virginia the two times it was mentioned.

The new parts of Normal are going to be posted in 3000-6000 word chapters, though I did not go back and try to break up the first few long ones.

Meanwhile, I've been doing pretty well with getting other content ready to post. I actually have a 14-month backlog of stories that are finished and are through at least one editing pass. Some of these are completely finished, and some I am still tinkering with. Some do not have their covers and may not have all their tags. But here's what I have (they may not be posted in this order):

• 16 remaining parts of Jody's Story
• A 10k story to be posted this Halloween while Jody is still going.
• 8 new chapters for Normal
• A story about a magical sweater with 10 parts, 47k words
• An RPG-as-real-life story with 9 parts and 40k words
• A story about a cursed dress with 13 parts, 50k words
• A story based on a silly premise. My third attempt at writing this ended up with a serious story, though still based on the silly premise. It ended up involving a witch and is tentatively scheduled after all these others so it ends at Halloween 2027, 7 parts, 31k words

You should realize that my writing process is disorganized. If I knew what I was going to write, I would write it the way we were taught to write in school, write an outline and then develop the parts. But I don't. Usually, I start with a spark of an idea. For example, for Ethertravelers, the idea that there is a mad scientist who tries to build a machine to swap people's minds into unborn babies to extend their lifetimes, but he doesn't realize that the machine operates faster than light, and so it can lock onto targets around distant stars rather than in the next room.

I will write out anywhere from 500 to 5000 words of a story in one session based on the idea. For Ethertravelers, the initial writing consisted of two parts: The story about the mad scientist, and a story about one alien world somebody ended up on. Sometimes, in the immediate next writing sessions, I have ideas where the story can go and I continue it. With Ethertravelers, I decided during one of these early sessions that the way people were reading the stories was that they did not come from the accidental far-sendings. Instead, later on, they decided this was how Earth was going to colonize other worlds, and the people who went there were sending back their stories of what the worlds were like. But sometimes, I have no idea how to continue it, and it sits in the folder of unfinished ideas until I look at it again.

But before I started posting here, nearly all the stories were written for some number of sessions like this, and that's it. They were never finished. Wanting to share these stories with the world meant not leaving them unfinished, like so many other unhappy stories you can find here. Some of the stories were already headed for an ending and just needed to write a conclusion. Some stories needed an idea for how it was supposed to finish, and then I might write a sort of an outline to get there. Some stories were actually already past the ending, and I had gone on pointlessly, and I needed to cut it off, or the idea went awry part way through, and needed to be cut off somewhere and finished differently. And sometimes I don't know what to do with the story and it just goes back on the pile. So I have tons of stories in various incomplete states. Most of the still unfinished stories are ones that I have not decided what to do with and they have not been modified since before I started, during the COVID quarantine, trying to finish stories to post them here, but there are some newer ones, too.

These are the other stories I have been working on since I started posting Jody:

• An old story about an alien who comes to Earth, using special skins to live here, since its species can't even breathe our atmosphere. The nearly omnipotent being that provided the skins provided them in different genders and ages to let the alien experience different aspects of life. I've been trying to finish this and fix it up for publication.
• An old story on an alternate Earth where a religious figure from our world was known for being the first person to discover how to access the alternate-sex bodies we all have within us, and that's the word he was known for spreading. Or she was. I didn't like how the original version of this story was presented, so it's getting a full rewrite from a different perspective.
• A new story about Earth's first manned mission to Mars getting kidnapped by shapeshifting aliens who have lost their home and want to learn how to live in human form on a new, Earthlike world. This story was able to successfully incorporate a concept from another story that I have failed to write multiple times, and it's getting close to being finished.
• The end of the cursed dress story mentioned above went off the rails, and the editing led to some of the ending getting cut. An idea from the cut content involving a ghost baby has become its own separate and now unrelated story, which is still short.
• A very new idea: Three witches figure out how to make the movies they watch more interesting by turning the credits into Mad Libs forms, and casting spells to swap members of the cast into different roles. What happens when, due to a counting error, an actress is swapped for a language?

I keep jumping around among these stories as ideas strike me.