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rowynI think of myself as a relatively focused writer these days. I'm not at maximum focus, "exactly one project at a time" level and I do not aspire to be. My ideal pipeline is something like:
- One work-in-progress that I'm outlining.
- One WIP I'm drafting.
- One WIP in initial edits
- One WIP in final edits/layout
I dislike having Just One WIP that I work on from outline to publication because I want each project to have some rest time in the editing process: time after I finish writing a draft to let the draft sit so I can edit it with relatively fresh eyes. Time to let first readers read and comment before I do final edits. Also, having some limited variety lets me switch projects when I don't feel like one, without returning to my pre-2012 years of poinging between ideas and seldom finishing anything. I've published 17 books and two shorter works in the last nine years with this kind of pipeline as aspirational if not exact practice. I am far from one of the most productive writers I know, but I am content with my output.
One author friend, CoffeeQuills, counts their WIPs at well over a hundred. If I understand correctly, this count included undeveloped ideas as a WIP -- so if they've written down a sentence of "ooh this would be fun to write", that's a WIP.
I sometimes wonder how many WIPs I'd have if I counted every unfinished idea. Another friend on a Discord server pulled out all their fiber arts WIPs and took a picture, and I thought "oooh pretty and all in one place like that, very nice". So today, in this entry, I'm gonna take a stab at doing just that: all the works of fiction I’ve started and never published.
Active WIPs
Outlining: Be That Way: A goblin, a catgirl, and a werewolf walk into a coffee shop. Now with 200% more lesbians!
Writing/illustrating/playing: Apothecaria, cozy fanfic about a witch gathering reagents and brewing potions to cure patients while wrestling with her past, new suitors, and her own romantic longings. In theory this is a game I'm doing just for fun, and in practice it requires creative energy just like writing original fiction does. It's not as much as writing a book, because I can draw cards for prompts when I'm not sure what to do.
Editing: A Dragonling's Family: Assured that no dragon wants the child, the Crow Lord adopts a dragon's egg after the mother passes away. Until the dragonling's uncle arrives to dispute this assertion.
These three are very solidly in the WIP stage: all things I have worked on in the last week, even.
Total so far: 3
I Will Definitely Finish This Someday
A Game to You: Grandmother in her sixties gets sucked into the world of MMO she played. She's supposed to fight off "a Great Evil", but the ethics of killing opponents in a game are nothing like those of fighting real, living people. LitRPG
The first draft is complete but also an intimidating mess of "I should have fleshed out this plot more UGH why is there so much to fix/rewrite/redo." I love this draft, though, so I will tackle it eventually.
Total so far: 4
I Already Wrote the Draft So Maybe I Should Edit It?
The Jewel-Strewn Night: After Kiran saves Jewel's life while diving in deep underwater caves on terraformed Mars, Jewel rescues Kiran from their abusive family. With the full encouragement of Jewel's betrothed, Caress, of course. But can Kiran accept that they're allowed to have nice things without falling in love with their benefactors? Polyam sf romance.
Fellwater: A triad plays a fully-immersive kink VR RPG run by their domme, in a fantasy setting full of extremely dubcon submission/sex/denial for the characters, with a bonus over-the-top plot about using dubcon sex to protect the world. Sff polyamorous erotica.
These have somewhat different problems; there's a climactic event in Jewel that I'm not sure works and the whole book is built around it so just taking it out leaves Giant Plot Void but idk that there's a good fix for it. Fellwater is in a genre I've never written and barely read, plus it needs a lot of edits, plus it's all weird kink stuff. I wrote it because it was fun to write but idk that there's a point to publishing it for the audience of 10 people who would find/read/enjoy it. But they go into a similar category of "arguably I've done most of the work for these and might as well finish and publish them."
Total so far: 6
I Have an Outline but Meh
The Fey, Her Fox, and Their Goddess: Originally an outline for an M|F fantasy romance that needed a few alterations to put it in continuity with the Etherium books. Instead of making those, I started re-working it to be an FFM romance and now it needs WAY MORE alterations idk what I was thinking. Thought about making this my next WIP. Shelved it because it's another book about rich powerful people and how their decisions impact their world, and I wanted to write a small-scale book about middle-class people with personal problems instead. There's a reasonable chance I'll write this some time.
The Immortal Etheriums: Prequel to the Etherium books. Queer polyamorous romance focused on three of the researchers who made fey immortality a reality. Shelved because my books with a 'magical research' theme have been pretty unpopular. I don't know that I'll ever get to this. Maybe? Everything I write is unpopular now so it doesn't matter as much if this is especially unpopular.
"Bowracer": Callie may have put her career on hold to marry Anthser, but she still wants to return to competitive bowracing. For that, though, she'll need a human partner...
This one was a novelette that I'd planned as part of Further Arrangements. But trying to write Callie & Anthser as a happy couple without writing out the events that brought them together was a struggle, so I wrote "A Regular Hero" instead. I don't have an outline for any other shorts and dislike publishing short works by themselves, so never wrote this. No particular reason I couldn't write it later, though.
Total so far: 9
Special Circumstances
The Lair of Dragons: A fantasy polyamorous kink romance unexpectedwonder and I were writing together. We had an outline-ish sort of thing and and a fairly clear idea of where it was going, but writing it was more like text roleplay than anything else. We'd just take turns writing different characters. One of us would write and then let the other know 'it's your turn' and then the other person would write. IIRC, UnexpectedWonder had some RL stuff she needed to focus on and couldn't keep writing it. I still remember this fondly and wouldn't mind revisiting it if my co-author was interested in doing so at some point.
PollRPG: An interactive fiction I ran on Dreamwidth and Twitter in early 2017, with diverging storylines in the same setting. This was fun in many ways but the pacing of it was challenging. Posting a story installment every day is easy for me (witness Apothecaria). Writing a story installment on a specific schedule is much harder. And because the course of the next installment was dictated by reader choices, I couldn't write ahead or build a buffer. Weirdly tempted to try a play-by-poll game again anyway, but I'd have to start a new story because no one's gonna remember or read through the beginning of this one in order to play along with a new one.
Total so far: 11
This Is a Cool Idea and I Made Some Notes
The Twin-Souled Empress: Doomed Empress prays for a saint to take charge of her life. Saint: "I don't see how I can possibly save her but maybe I can give her a dignified death?" Drama ensues. Fantasy polyamorous romance.
The Way the World Ends: After forseeing the end of the world, a prophet tries to avert catastrophe. She has frequent visions of how her recent actions impact the future, from a spirit guide who varies between coaching her on how to avert the apocalypse and telling her she cannot possibly change it and needs to focus on protecting a handful of people through it instead.
This is so convoluted I don't know how to plot it out, much less make it work. But I like the idea.
The Least of All Monsters: The humans of Tizhoir call them angels: beautiful, alien, human-like beings with inhuman abilities. But earthly life is not kind, and Eleonor knows her brother Aristide is more demon than angel, however much he loves her. What Rafael is -- she doesn't know at all.
I did a whole bunch of world building and backstory for this, and then could never figure out what I was trying to do with the actual story.
Real: Rosalee Dannon is a freelance journalist in 21st century America. Rosario Chantell is a space marine fighting a losing war on unfamiliar worlds against alien invaders. Princess Rose is trying to unravel a curse at work on her family's palace. But they all share the same problem: they are all insane.
I still look at my notes for this and go "maybe I should try to make this work?" But it's the sort of story where not unraveling the mystery would frustrate me and any unraveling would be much less interesting than the mystery was. Also, it could easily turn into a bunch of bad stereotypes re: mental health and plural systems.
Although I did just think of a thing that would help counter the Bad Stereotypes angle, Imma write that down before I forget.
"Laudan": A tarot story, from when I was taking prompts and writing stories based on the prompt + drawing three tarot cards. I made an outline for it and wrote the first half and then never finished it because I didn't like my planned resolution anymore. The first half is weird and cute, though.
Among Monsters: Five of the "word of the indefinite time period" stories I wrote back in 2009 were loosely connected. They were kind of low-key and slice-of-life small-town fantasy and I always wanted to make a book out of them somehow but didn't know where I was going with it.
The Way You Play: I haven't even figured out all the revisions I want to make to A Game to You, much less mage them, but for some reason I decided to start making notes for the sequel. Like 5700 words of notes. Brains be like that.
Total So Far: 18
Started Writing, Didn’t Know Where It Was Going, Gave Up But Still Kinda Like the Idea
Annabel Cane: Annabelle Cane loves everything about the Helena N. Taskit School of Theory and Practice: the enchanted grounds, her classmates, her teachers -- everything! Except, perhaps, the part where they expect her to learn things.
A school of magic with furries. This was relatively recent, 2011, but I hadn't yet given up on the idea that I could just start things with no idea where I was going and still finish them.
"The Memento Box": The diary and correspondence of Treis Traynor.
This was kind of an interesting project -- a physical box that contained mementos, letters, and a diary with sketches, all with the conceit of belonging to Treis Traynor, a character from the Silver Scales setting. It was more an artifact than anything else; not designed to be reproduced. The diary was hand-written and hand-illustrated, using pencils and markers. I didn't get very far in writing this, though I collected several tokens to include in the box.
The Changelings: When the Fae folk steal human children, they treat those children well -- but not all of the children forget where they came from, or that they were stolen.
This one is super old, from when I was 17, but still kind of intrigues me -- it was a group of kids from like 8 to 17 or so, with an implication that the faerie had stolen them from their human families and given them magical powers for some sinister purpose. Maybe the faerie had lied about giving them magical powers and the kids were stolen specifically because they already had magical powers? I didn't know where I was going with it. Doubt I’m ever revisiting it, though.
Total So Far: 21
Sequels I've Considered But Made No Real Effort to Start
Pyrite Chains: Third book in The Warlock, the Hare, and the Dragon.
Wisteria's Daughter: Everyone would be disappointed by what I have in mind for this one because the daughter takes after Justin much more than Wisteria.
Another Fey-Touched Novel, this one about Lightning, Raindrop's older brother.
Sequels to the Demon's Series. I have more plans for these characters, but these books are really hard to write and I'm kind of like "I've got 50 other ideas that would be easier." o_o;;; Counting this as two WIPs because it’d be at least two more books.
Total So Far: 26
Nothing But Vibes
I have a "Story Ideas Master List" which has really short notes on things, like:
Gorgeous, dangerous, sexy woman who deals with gorgeous, dangerous, sexy men constantly. Hopelessly In love with her responsible & vanilla assistant but doesn't tell him because, y'know, doesn't want to sexually harass him.
That's it, that's the whole idea, two sentences, nothing else. I'm not listing these individually because there's nothing to list, but I'll count how many of these short items are there. 21.
Total So Far: 47
Any rational calculation would stop here because I have no intention of ever revisiting anything lower down on this list. But I’ll add up all the other unfinished stuff anyway.
Abandoned
Delight-in-World-Tree: A fanfic serial I wrote, mostly in 2010. I finished several arcs for it and everything I wrote for the journal is posted, so it's not like an unfinished draft no one has seen. I never got to some of the stuff I'd planned to do, though. I don't see myself revisiting this journal at this point, though. It's been too long.
Total so far: 48
Technically I Drafted This But I'm Never Publishing it
Prophecy: Prophecies have ruined the lives of Mariel Sunfire and all of her ancestors for a hundred generations. If the only way to stop Fate from ruining her children's lives too is to destroy the world, then that's a price Mariel is willing to pay.
The first draft I finished as an adult. It's very literary and grim because I thought literary and grim were cool at the time. I am no longer impressed by literary and grim and have no interest in publishing it. If this seems too harsh, I want to point out that I edited the draft and sent it to six or so volunteer beta readers. None of them ever sent feedback on it.
Riddlequest, book 1: A novella-length work I wrote in my teens, as book 1 of 5. I'm missing the first and last chapters, IIRC. Even when I was writing this, I thought of it as practice (unlike books I started when I was even younger and thought would be masterpieces). There's nothing in it that makes it worth digging up and working on again. I don't think it's even entertainingly bad, in the way Jim Hines gave the MST3K treatment to his own first novel draft.
Total so far: 50
So Close But Oops
Sign & Sacrifice: My 2007 NaNoWriMo novel. I still like some parts of this idea and especially main characters, but it turned into a mess of half-formed social justice concepts before I got to the end. Also the central mystery has serious Wait No This Was a Mistake issues. I don't think it's salvageable.
Total so far: 51
Started Writing, Never Finished, Didn't Know Where It Was Going, Little to No Interest in Revisiting
Flight Rising Fanfic: Back when Maggie and I used to play Flight Rising, we wrote dragon bios that sometimes became intricate and intertwined; I even wrote out a long arc that came to a dramatic and catastrophic conclusion, and sucked in half of the Dragon Writers' Chat participants to come to my aid. Anyway, Flight Rising, a site about buying, selling, and breeding sapient dragons, deleted some of my bios without warning for either (a) mentioning that kink exists or (b) for being adjacent to a dragon whose bio mentioned the existence of kink. (Only some of the bios that mentioned kink exisiting, tho. Not all of them. None of my bios on the site had sexual content.) I lost interest in writing fanfic for the game after that, and also in having anything to do with the game. Still at negative interest today. Arguably, this is miscategorized: I don't know that I had anything "unfinished" about this. I don't think I was in the middle of any story arcs when I quit. But without the random unwarned bio-deletion, I expect I would've written more. As it is, I went through, backed up, and deleted all of my remaining bios, so these writings are no longer available anywhere and are very unlikely to ever be available again.
Nightmare Waking: Ashlin tried to retire and take up a nice hobby, like gardening, but a Nightmare's work is never done.
I had recently finished Silver Scales without an outline and thought I could write another book based on a vague idea of where I was going. Nope. Wrote 14,000 words before I quit, though. Worked on this in my 30s.
"Reema", "Furtown", "Tangled Web", "Bullet": Wrote 1000-2000 words on each of these three shorts. I had specific plans for "Reema" and "Tangled Web" but lost interest in writing them. I never really knew where I was going with "Furtown" or "Bullet". These were also in my 30s.
The Caged Bird: Being the queen's newest pet means a nicer sort of cage than being a prisoner in the town's dungeons -- but it is not a much safer role.
I had more plans for this story than I wrote down or wrote out, but I never knew how I was going to resolve it or even had a clear idea of what the central conflict was. I was in my 20s for this one.
Hope: Hope loses her world as a young woman, and spends her life on a generation ship headed for another. But will the new world welcome them when they arrive?
I did a six-page comic of the start of this story when I was in my early 20s. It's literary and grim and was in competition with Prophecy when I was picking a novel idea to resume work on in 2002. I'm not writing Hope for the same reason I'm not doing final edits on Prophecy: I don't actually enjoy literary and grim very much.
The Lost River of Tears: Shadowsteel knows he's not the most conventional sort of unicorn, but he never thought even he could misplace his entire river.
A rare attempt at comedy for me! This was an amusing concept -- unicorn gathers motley band of animal/monster allies to help him find his missing river -- but I didn't know how I was going to resolve it. I did know what happened to the river, though! Better than I was usually doing at this period -- I was 19 at the time.
A Deal's A Deal: What happens when the sword that can kill any target is set against the shield that can stop any weapon? (Hint: it's not good.)
Perhaps the first time I tried to write a detailed outline for a novel. I made notes for the first four chapters, decided "surely that's good enough", and started writing. I didn't make it through the four chapters.
Day and Night: When the Sun worshippers set out to destroy the night forever, a lone priestess of the Night must convince them of the necessity for balance.
Goodness, this was melodramatic.
Kelly and the MacGuffin: An alien presence wants Kelly to save the world by finding an unpronounceable and unidentifiable artifact. "And this is supposed to save my world?" "Oh, no. Not YOUR world."
I think that last sentence was the best part about this story start. Don't know where I was going with it. Wrote three scenes and quit.
Thief of Argus: As long as Terry has been alive, her native city of Argus has had more abandoned buildings than occupied ones. She finally finds out why, when Argus's army returns from its twenty-year campaign -- and decides to assume control of the city.
A friend was running this as a D&D campaign, and the first several sessions felt much more story-like than most of my RPG experiences. I started writing it as a book, but eventually the game lost focus and I couldn't figure out how to resolve the story I was writing either. I was 16 or 17. It was not good. I still have parts of this, but I don't even want to re-read them to see if they're as bad as I remember.
Draco: Sometimes the dragon needs to rescue the knight from the evil princess.
The elevator pitch is better than the actual text was. I wrote at least 50 pages of this and at no point had any idea what I was doing or where I was going with it. A protagonist's horse randomly became a major character. If you're thinking "wait, that sounds cool": no, it wasn't. I was 15 and extremely proud of it at the time, though. All drafts are lost to time, I have nothing of this and no regrets about losing it.
The Princess, the Witch, and the Evil Advisor: This might be the first thing I ever tried writing? I think it was on 8" discs. It was arguably AU fanfic for "You Can't Do That on Television", although I don't think it was recognizable as such. The witch was the protagonist and the princess was a vain, annoying dupe, I think. I remember nothing else. Nothing remains of this, either
Total: 66
I think that's everything I could conceivably count as either a current or former WIP that is by some standard not "finished". The first six are the only ones that I personally think of as WIPs. I even have them organized as WIPs in my Google Drive directory. They're subfolders of my "Fiction" folder, and start with numbers so that they sort to the top when sorted by alphabetically by filename. All my other projects (finished and not) are also there but not numbered. If I removed the numbers from Jewel or Fellwater I'd think of them as "abandoned" rather than "WIPs", though.
