(no subject)

[the_rck]

So I did end up counting words and thereby cat waxing. This is my WIP word count reaching back into projects I started in the 1990s and carrying through to projects I just started this year.

Leaving aside the stories I don’t plan to go back to, I have 375,239 words of WIP. 145064 of that is unposted bits of fics I expect to be novel length, and 24946 of that is unposted bits of fics I expect to be short stories with all the rest being things I’ve posted, the bits of Rheotaxis and Torsion on AO3.

I’m counting Occlusion as unposted because I never put it at AO3 (and because I forgot about it being at my website when I was number crunching), and that’s 9976 words. Oh, drat. I forgot that part of Apotheosis, the standalone bit called "Snare," is at AO3. That throws my count off, too. It’s 8361 words. So there are nearly 20000 words that should be moved from the unposted novel length section to the posted fic section that should be moved from the unposted category to the posted category. I’m confusing myself.

(And I’ve got some Rheotaxis fragments unposted and likely to be discarded that I didn’t count anywhere at all. That’s probably another 2000 to 4000 words.)

That’s a lot of incomplete stuff, a lot of words going nowhere. I hesitate to label any of it dead, but I’ll be damned if I have any idea how I’m going to finish all of this, particularly when I love doing exchanges and keep both coming up with ideas and adding other people’s prompts to my fics-to-write-someday list. I kind of wish I was willing to let some of it go. Not Rheotaxis, that’s posted and probably near to done (which may mean another 50000 words), but other stories. I don’t even want to delete the prompts I’m pretty sure I’ll never get around to starting, but I probably should consider doing it.

How do other people deal with this sort of thing?

Comments

[maramcreates]

I'm not sure if this would work for you, but when it comes to downsizing in general, I usually employ a quarantine system. Basically, I set the items aside, as if I had gotten rid of them, and if I don't miss them once a predetermined amount of time has passed, then out they go.

[the_rck]

Some of these are things that I haven't written a word on in at least fifteen years. The thing is that, when I see the files or, worse, look at what I've written, the stories grab me again.

But I think I could probably do that for unwritten prompts. I should.

[sylvaine]

Occasionally I think about posting my unfinished WIP to my journal, at least, but then mostly that ends up with me forgetting about it again and them continuing to sit on my harddrive.

[the_rck]

I've had a policy for years that I won't post WIP because my first posted fic is still incomplete, fifteen or sixteen years later. I haven't given up on it, but I also have been stuck for the last three years. I really don't want to have another long fic that draws itself out over that many years.

At the same time, I am the sort of writer who thrives on being able to talk to people about what I'm working on and on showing bits of it to other folks to get feedback on what works and what doesn't.

[ayebydan]

I don't deal. I get confused and anxious and die a little inside when I think about it. For a hobby thing on the internet writing can get super complicated.

Plus I'm writing a series of thing sin the same 'verse' of original fic about a German soldier returning home to Germany after WW1 and I get so stressed on thinking of how I will organise it on my writing journal and such.

[the_rck]

Oh, dear. My sympathies! Anxiety is pretty thoroughly horrible in the way that it can take something that was fun and turn it inside out so that it hurts.

If I can help in any way, please let me know. If nothing else, I'm always happy to talk writing in general and whatever someone else is working on in particular. I have no idea if either would be useful but maybe.

[snogged.livejournal.com]

That's an impressive word count. :)

[the_rck]

Well, it goes back to some time in the mid-1990s, so this is twenty years worth of accumulated fragments. I've lost everything older than that, mostly to software changes. I've finished a lot of stuff in that time, too. (It's hard to do a word count because I wrote LARP scenarios pretty exclusively during that decade. Each of those was a couple of dozen short, 2-4 page, documents. I finished at least one a year for about fifteen years, starting in 1987 or 1988.)