Oeuvre, part two

Some years ago -- 2009 for the first attempt, and then again in 2012 -- I started a spreadsheet to record pretty much all the fiction I’ve ever written. At the time, it consisted mostly of fragments. I had two novel drafts and some complete short fiction, and almost everything else was abandoned.

Once I’d created the thing, keeping it updated was relatively easy. I was looking at it again on Friday, and said on Twitter that my writing habits divide into eras. I wanted to dig into the numbers and see how accurate this perception was.

1984-1992: Start tons of ideas, finish almost none of them.
I have fourteen starts from this period. Three were complete short fiction. One was a 5-part series; I finished the draft for the first part, which was supposed to be a novel but turned out to be a longish novella. The other ten were intended as novels, and all unfinished.
Completion rate
Short fiction: 100% 3/3
Longer works: 9% 1/11(We’ll give Young Me credit for the finished novella as the novel she meant it to be, and not count the four unfinished parts.)

1993-1996: Only if I have to
I wrote 5 new short stories in this time frame, all of them for classes. I also re-wrote a piece of short fiction for the fanzine Pawprints, because Greywolf mentioned being short on writing submissions. Beyond that, I started one novel idea and didn’t get very far with it. It’s possible I worked on some of my earlier ideas in this period, but I don’t think so.
Completion rate
Short fiction: 100% 6/6
Longer works: 0% 0/1

1997-2001: Writing by myself is hard, let's just RP.
I didn’t start any new fiction during this period and I’m pretty sure I didn’t work on any older ideas either. But I learned important stuff about writing during this period: namely, How to Finish Long Works. Not novels, no: RPG arcs. But there’s a lot of overlap between text-based RPGs and writing fiction. Getting a satisfying conclusion to an RPG story is more challenging than doing the same with a traditional story, because you can’t control player actions and you are constrained by their choices. Greywolf showed me that it was doable, however. Sometimes you can’t get the perfect climactic resolution, but you can bring it to some kind of conclusion.
Completion rate
Short fiction: NA
Longer works: NA

2002-2012: No, seriously, I want to write
In 2002, I dusted off one of my novel ideas from 1991 and finished the draft and initial edits on it: Prophecy, making it my first novel-length draft in 2004 and the first book I wrote a complete outline for. I also started Silver Scales in 2003 and finished the first draft in 2006, making it the only novel I ever finished without doing an outline. In addition, I started 7 new works of long fiction that I did not finish. I started 34 pieces of short fiction and finished 29 of them. Most of the short fic was in 2009, when I wrote word-of-the-indefinite-time-period stories, or 2012, when I wrote stories using prompts and three-card tarot draws for inspiration. I wrote the Delight-in-World-Tree fanfic serial during this period, which I’m not counting in the stats because I never conceived of it as a commercial publication. Also, I completed the last arc I started for Delight-in-WT, but I’d always meant to write more. So it’s Schrödinger's fiction, neither complete nor incomplete.
Completion rate
Short fiction: 85% 29/34
Longer works: 22% 2/9 (denominator includes Prophecy, started in 1991)

2013-present: Wait, books! I want to write books
I started and finished the first draft of A Rational Arrangement in 2013, and finished editing it in 2015. This began the era when I would finish writing far more books than I started. I started 19 novels in this period. I finished writing 11 of those starts, and finished drafting another 4. One of the remainder is my current WIP (Alien Peacelords) and the last 3 are notes/outlines that I developed but haven’t started writing. In addition to these, I published 2 novels that I’d started work on in the previous decade (Silver Scales and Golden Coils.) For shorter fiction, I published 3 novelettes and 2 novellas, and outlined 1 novelette that I didn’t end up writing. Not counted: the Poll RPG/interactive fiction, which I thought of more as a game or an experiment.
Completion rate
Short fiction: 83% 5/6
Longer works: 80% 16/20 (denominator includes Golden Coils, started in 2006. I’m counting first drafts as “completed”, so I counted Scales earlier and not here.)

So my completion rate for short fiction has always been high, probably because with shorts I knew where they were going. When I didn’t know where something was going, I intended for it to be a novel. I was never a big reader for short fiction, whereas I’ve read thousands of novels, so I generally thought in terms of novels.

My completion rate for long fiction is where the big change happened -- from 3 out of 21 before 2013 to 16 out of 20 since.

Something not captured in the numbers is that my “unfinished ideas” for novels changed from “I wrote the first X pages and then stopped” to “I wrote an outline” or “I made some notes that didn’t gel into an outline.” My only “I started writing this but haven’t finished it” since 2012 is Alien Peacelords, which I am working on now and expect to finish drafting this year. From 2012 and earlier, I have 14 books that I started writing and never finished. 4 of those were 20,000+ words each. I did more planning in the 2002-2012 period, but it remained in fits and starts. For a while, finishing Silver Scales made me think that I wanted to be a pantser. It took me 6 years to decide that, no, that wasn’t working.

I do sometimes go back to my earlier work and pick it up again. There are a few ideas from 2002-2012 that I may yet write, although the ones with the most appeal are the ones where I just have an assortment of notes.

It also wasn’t until 2013 that I admitted to myself that I wanted to write romances and not just romantic subplots. Especially queer polyam fantasy romances. 7 of my 15 published titles are queer polyam fantasy romance! And I only have two published books that do not have a major romantic plotline. This had a huge impact on my work.

Anyway, not sure this is of interest to anyone but me, but I like to record things in my journal for my own later reference. :)