The it's a loooong story thread version 2.0 - announcement 7/30 - pg6 - blue

So how do you do that? I searched around a bit, but maybe I was looking in the wrong place.

 

In my case, I generally use a prologue that is in the past or far in the future (my two current WIPs) to set the general tone of the fic and give some hint as to the general direction. Mainly because in a very long epic, you can't always start the first chapter giving a clue as to the general tone and general direction of the fic - that is unveiled as you continue to write.

One of my WIPs is currently at 65000+ words, and my second WIP is at 17000+ words. I have three completed epics in another fandom (HP), one which came in at 190,000 and two others at 80K and about 60K. I love epics!! Before I begin posting, I make sure I have my "stepping stones" and ending in place - at least in loose note form. That way I can keep the plot tight and always heading to the ending without meandering (I hope), while still leaving myself some room for fun additional scenes or subplots.

 

PM the info to spiritgirl.

 

Update: The Fallen Shroud has now surpassed the eighty thousand word mark, on its way to the One Hundred Thousand Club.

 

I'm now past 20K on The Droid Empress... it's sitting at 24K right now (Gold! Yay!) and one more chapter should push it over the requisite 25K for indexing. My initial estimate of 30-40K was an underestimate, and I'm now thinking it'll stop somewhere in the low 50s. Which, again, could turn out to be very wrong. I have my chapters planned out but tend to guess incorrectly on chapter length.

I ended up with the "camera" following different characters, since I have more simultaneous subplots with this story than the one before it. That's making it go on a lot longer than I anticipated because more than one thing happens at a given time. (For instance, Chapters 8 and 9 happen simultaneously, but with different characters.) I'm not used to writing like that. I've written six stories that are multichaptered. Two were in first person, and three in third person following a single character (or following a single character *most* of the time). This is first one that seriously does not focus on a main character, but rather several major characters whose plotlines merge and unmerge at various times. One of them is technically the main character but it's not just her story.

This is fun.

 

Congratulations to both of you

 

Oh, Lord, maderic, my sincere condolences. That's where the going gets brutal, or at least it did for me.

At the risk of getting slapped by people who've seen this before, I feel the need to repost my poetic "masterpiece" for the suffering souls in purgatory--I mean, fanfic authors with really long novels.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at my Fanfic Novel
(With no apologies whatsoever to Wallace Stevens)

I
Out of a twenty-line ?to do? list,
The only thing I?ve bothered with
Is my stupid fanfic novel.

II
I hit my head with a hammer three times
Like an author
Who is writing three fanfic novels.

III
My fanfic novel sucked up my hard drive space.
It was a large part of the reason
I was on psychotropic medication.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a fanfic novel
Are grounds for divorce.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
Writing my fanfic novel all at once
Or in little fits and starts.
Yanking off a Band-Aid suddenly
Or with tiny painful rips over and over.

VI
Ice cubes filled my Long Island Iced Tea
In a 32 oz glass.
The hassle of my fanfic novel
Made this necessary
The plot
Inspired by booze
Made about as much sense as anything else I?ve written lately.

VII
O doofy Star Wars geeks,
Why do you shell out for EU novels?
Do you not see how fanfic novels
Have Jedi nookie
And are free?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That I will never get paid for this
Because I write stupid freaking fanfic novels.

IX
When my fanfic novel passed 100,000 words
It marked the edge
Of my last fragment of sanity.

X
At the sight of my fanfic novel
Hogging 400K of space
Even collectors of giant .mpegs
Would call that a waste.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he thought he left the disk containing his fanfic novel
Back in the hotel.

XII
The neighbors are moving
My fanfic novel must be getting wider exposure than I thought.

XIII
I called a hotline about my fanfic novel
I said I was typing
And I was going to type
They asked if I
Was a danger to myself.
I said ?Yes.?

 

Burn! Burn! Burn! just passed 47,500 words.
Can I join this thread now?

 

Of course you can!! Welcome and congratulations!!

 

Thank you! Thank you very much.
Must go and come with some more words...

 

After a long and very nastybad no-good week, chapter 10 of The Droid Empress is up, and I'm now submitting it to the Index as it is 27,400 words. Nothing compared to most in the thread, I'm sure, but it's in range, and I've still got roughly half to go before the plot is done.

Edit 12/3: It's finished at: 61,800 words, give or take a few

 

Approaching 92,000. Closing in on that 100K crown. -___-

 

I finished The Final Battle some time ago at 50k+ words.

 

I've been picking over the bones of SWoA ("Star Wars on Acid," or sometimes "Spirit Warriors of Angharad" for those who don't remember--dreadful title) in an attempt to get some of it edited. Only about the first third of it was gone over in anything like a thorough manner. By the end, I was practically typing blindfolded and just hitting "post," since I was so sick of it.

That leaves me with only about 400 pages to edit.

 

I just finished How to Deal and the last post brought it to 25,025 words

 

Ugh... I'm trying to revive the bones of "Clone Wars: Twilight"...

I did finally post Chapter 3 yesterday, but it's so much work to get this thing back on its feet.

Anyone have any thoughts/comments/suggestions on my fic? (Link in sig)

 

The Blue Side of the Force has officially made it to 30,000 words. sw00tiness. And I'm not even halfway done... I'll make it into the 100,000 word club, yet.

 

I....feel like I've been hit with an inflatible sledgehammer of literary goodness. It's an amazingly awkward feeling. One hundred thousand words. My baby, The Fallen Shroud, has passed the one hundred thousand (100,000 ) word mark. I've never wrote anything remotely close to that. My longest works, fiction or fanfiction, have all peaked out at about 30,000. I have a novel I'm working on (non fanfic, of course) that's hovering around 44,000 right now and that's only because of NaNoWriMo. But this has just floored me. I never expected it to be this big, but I'll be darned if it doesn't feel good to see Words: 100,175 on MS Word. Frighteningly enough, the story's not over yet.

And now, in cruel irony, I am at a loss of words as to how I feel about it.

 

I just hit 50,000 with Lest Ye Be Judged rewrite and am not even a quarter of the way finished.

 

a very late congrats, DarthIsh!

Upping this for people to see!

 

How many words do we have to have to be indexed?

 

1,000,000

that was deadpan, but i really don't know the answer. Just have a loooooooooooooooooooooooong story.

 

Mine past the 30,000 word mark, so I'm curious.

 

I believe it's 25,000+ words for indexing.

Index Link

At 100,000 words you get a little image to put in the first post of your fic, which serves to warn people away.

I'm trying to find the first 100,000-word image I made, which was of a Sisyphus-like guy rolling a rock up a hill.

Edit: Ha! Here it is:

[image=http://members.aol.com/opheliamac/sisyphus100.gif]

 

I PM'ed the person in charge of the index a while ago. Guess I could post a the details in the thread, but I just wasn't sure how many words I had to have to be indexed. Thanks!