My latest story, which I guess I’ll title “Orphans of Opry Tower”, after the lead characters (helps that I’ve thought of it by that title for many months now), has crested 30,000 words since I started actually writing it, as opposed to conceptualizing it (see here, here, and here), late last May. I’ve just now, as of last night, gotten to the point where the orphans are at the train station getting their tickets from the local androids (well, really Texan androids, but they were ordered up by Union Station in Nashville, where the kids live 😉 ). The way I’ve divvied it up for writing purposes, that’s around the middle of part four, out of nine total.
After this point I have the actual train ride to go, then their spa day in Kamchatka, then the part where they take the sailboat to their mysterious father’s island, followed by the climactic battle in the typhoon, then finally the denouement as they go back to their penthouse in Nashville. That’s a lot, but it might not end up being quite as much as the dialogue-heavy party scenes that have made up a disproportionate amount of the book so far.
Nevertheless, at this point it’s all but certain that “Orphans of Opry Tower” will crest the 40,000 word mark that it takes for me to characterize a story as a “novel”. After a long lull where I was primarily putting out short stories, it seems that I’ve had more long stories in me; I completed “Heart of Proxima” in September, weighing in at 65,000 words, releasing it last December, and also last December I wrote a novel-length treatment of the Rapunzel Reinhardt story (which I perhaps will title “Written on the Comet” when I see fit to release it), weighing in at 48,000 words. Now this June I will likely complete “Orphans of Opry Tower” at over 40,000 words; exact length, of course, to be determined as I write it up.
Release date? Who knows. The oldest story in my backlog that’s yet to be released is my chronicle of the end of the universe, which weighs in at a mere 5,000 words, i.e. it’s a short story. The Astoria boarding house story, at 17,000 words (what I bill a “novella”) is another one, along with my far-future vastness-of-space duology (weird way to name it, I know, but whatever), the first installment of which weighs in at 1,200 words and the second 2,600 words. Oh, and not to mention the Rapunzel Reinhardt story, my only unreleased novel, at 48,000 words. That’s five stories that I could drip-drip-drip over the rest of the year, or even beyond!
I even have a few more concepts that I could start working on after I complete “Orphans of Opry Tower”, but I probably won’t be in any position to write more material until later in the summer, if not after that, so the little saga of the triplets will be it for now as far as me being in “write, write, write” mode goes for a while.
At the 30,000 word mark, I’ve enjoyed writing up the story so far; it’s the first story I’ve ever written that features children as the protagonists, and that’s been fun; the setting and premise has allowed me to work in a lot of worldbuilding in a tight and natural way, which I always find really fun. The Gothic elements too have been enjoyable. It can be a bit of a chore sometimes, and a story this big (it was originally envisioned as a short story, but it grew in the conceptualizing stage!) is taking a long time, an almost frustratingly long time, to write up, but I’m sure at the end, like always, it’ll be a result I can be proud of. 😀