Oeuvre

[rowyn]

ursulav posted a list of a few days ago of all her works-in-progress, which reminded me that I wanted a list like that of my own. Only not just works-in-progress, but everything. The stories I'd finished, the ones I'd definitely abandoned, the ones in various states of "maybe I'll work on it again some day". A list of my oeuvre.

To make it a little more interesting, I decided to write brief descriptions/teasers for each, no more than a couple sentences. A kind of "elevator pitch", except that since I was writing one of these for every story that I have or have not finished, I didn't fuss endlessly over 25 words.

This made it take a lot longer.

When I was about 90% through, I discovered this was not the first time I'd decided to do something like this. In 2009.

...

Really, you'd think I'd remember doing this before, but I didn't. o.o

When I did it in 2009, I listed only titles, dates, and page counts. It was more comprehensive in that I included a category called "stubs": generally bits with no apparent plot that I wrote in one sitting, for a page or three, with no particular intention of ever writing more.

This time around, I only included completed works and incomplete ones where I had (a) written about the same idea in more than one session (b) I'd had some kind of conception, however vague, regarding a plot, and (c) for novels, if I'd either written 3000+ words, or done a significant amount of word-building/wrote out most of an outline. There were at least 21 separate bits of fiction that appeared on the 2009 survey that didn't make this cut. I also only included solo fiction: no RP, no collaboration, no gaming background material.

The end result of my latest survey:

I have written thirty-five complete short works (13,000 words or less, in my case) and two novels (200,000+ words, again in my case). No, I have never completed any fiction in more than 13,000 but less than 200,000 words. No, I don't know why.

I have begun work on six short stories and twenty novels without finishing them.

This suggests that the odds that I will complete any given novel are 1 in 11, while the odds of completing a short are more like 6 to 1.

Total word count: 928,470. I am almost to my million crappy words! Or well beyond my million crappy words, if you count any of the categories I excluded, like the collaboration I worked on with ladyperegrine over the summer, or the hundreds of thousands of words in text RP, or the backgrounds I wrote up for various RP games, or my myriad nonfiction essays on LJ and elsewhere.

I did the oeuvre in a Google Drive spreadsheet. If I can find some convenient way to convert it to an html table for LJ, I'll put it up here for y'all to marvel at. I am not sure what else I am going to do with it. One reason I wanted it was for the same reason Ursula did hers -- I wanted a reference of all the incomplete stories that I would still like to finish someday. Because that list is long enough that I can no longer remember it off the top of my head. (It's not all six shorts or all twenty novel ideas, but it is nearly half of those.)

But I do begin to understand one of the responses to "Where do you get your ideas?": "It's not 'where do I get them'. It's 'how do I make them stop.'"

Comments

[level-head.livejournal.com]

As far as such show-stopping ideas are concerned ... you can take your pick. ];-)

I'd like to see the list — and could help with the formatting, I think.

===|==============/ Level_Head