How many novels have you written?

[Clara Hollyberry]

If you love to write, and so many of us do, how many words have you written in recent history?  I've suddenly become obsessed with inadvertent achievements and I have come to the conclusion that within the SL forum alone one of the esteemed contributors has written the equivalent of 7 novels. Edit: 7 Excellent novels.

Words matter, and this is wonderful.  So, how many novels have you written?  Are you a roleplayer who churns out 5000 typed words a week in-scene?  Are you a forum contributer who churns out a pile of good advice every day?  Are you a data-entry specialist who churns out screen after screen of essential visual data over many months at a time?  

I was using Pride and Prejudice as my novel-word-count anchor,  a novel with 122,189 words.  I figured out that in my 3 years of roleplay, such as they were, and within my SL presence generally since 2012, I almost achieved what RaeLeeH has achieved in the forums alone. 

Edited August 29, 2019 by Clarrellae

[Lindal Kidd]

While it can vary a lot, "novel length" is generally considered to be anything over about 50,000 words.  Most run about 60 - 80,000.

[Clara Hollyberry]

Yes, the variation is considerable; from Tolstoy's War and Peace to Richard Bach's Illusions and everything in between... that's why I gave my metric as my measuring stick for this one.

[Janet Voxel]

[Ren Toxx]

0.01

Edited August 29, 2019 by Ren Toxx

[Clara Hollyberry]

16 minutes ago, janetosilio said:

 

I see no shade   Just a whole lot of excitement about numbers that is mentally occupying me while I do some things today.  Regardless of who responds, now I'm looking at numbers.

And I have such a phenomenal respect for writers in general (especially the one who inspired this thread) that this thread pleases me on many levels.

[ThorinII]

Oh, in roleplay terms, I probably wrote a few novels back in '08-'10 when I was roleplaying with my first account. I still keep some of the chatlogs  saved for later use for a story based on that roleplay, using the  character I played.

But for actual novels, I did write some indeed:

So far, I've self-published a novel* in German, and its translation into English, and a little 30 page short TG story in English on Amazon. And currently I'm working on a sequel to this novel, and on a sequel to that short story.

And I'm collecting ideas for the 2nd sequel to the novel - which begins about 1 year after the end of the first novel -- and will also be in the same "story universe" as the Short Story.😎

 

*This 200 pages or so long novel I published is actually based on the first two chapters of a crappy novel  I wrote back then in '06 😣

Edited August 29, 2019 by ThorinII

[BelindaN]

Oh I'm not sure if you mean RL, but out there I write. Mostly magazine articles, but a few years ago I did a chapter in a specialist book, and I had my own book published last year. Best described as "Arts & Crafts"!!

 

[Bree Giffen]

I wrote a story about talking dogs that my teacher thought was the funniest story and gave me an A+.

[Madelaine McMasters]

The longest tomes I've ever written were FMEA* documents for products I'd designed. I don't have a word-count, but one of them was more than 400 pages long, took two months to write and was never read by anyone but me. The exercise was not pointless, finding fault in my own work is a valuable skill. That's not what you have in mind.

I also wrote a chapter for a published engineering textbook, which was originally rejected because the editor did not think it appropriate for people to laugh out loud while reading it. I stood my ground, the chapter went to print,  and my dreams of retiring as a published author faced the reality of a $75 royalty check. That's not what you have in mind.

I write a lot here. People seem to read some of it. But "novel" doesn't describe the nature of what I do. If we're only discussing word-count, I've probably written close to a novel's worth of SL username/password entries over the last eleven years. If you are talking about storytelling, that's different. I love telling stories, but I do it in small doses. I'm the 15 second commercial to other's two hour movies and I'm trying to work my way down to 2 seconds, so I can say...

...that's my two seconds worth.

*Failure Modes and Effects Analysis

[MoiraKathleen]

I like the thought of people's collected postings being compared to the length of a novel.   I'm not a writer, in any world, but do consider myself a reader, so now that I can think about the number of 'novels' I'm reading here, I don't feel so bad about reading in the forums rather than reading a RL novel. 

 

(With the amount of changes to what I've written and the amount of time it takes me to finally compose a reply of just a sentence or two here, it would probably take a lifetime for me to write a novel's worth of words, even at the smaller end of novel length)

[MoiraKathleen]

4 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

If you are talking about storytelling, that's different. I love telling stories,

and I enjoy the little stories you post here, whether they're with words or with images.

[Eggy UwU]

I've not written anything that's a long novel...but I love writing short stories and poems if that counts.

[Selene Gregoire]

2 hours ago, Clarrellae said:

If you love to write, and so many of us do, how many words have you written in recent history?  I've suddenly become obsessed with inadvertent achievements and I have come to the conclusion that within the SL forum alone one of the esteemed contributors has written the equivalent of 7 novels. Edit: 7 Excellent novels.

Words matter, and this is wonderful.  So, how many novels have you written?  Are you a roleplayer who churns out 5000 typed words a week in-scene?  Are you a forum contributer who churns out a pile of good advice every day?  Are you a data-entry specialist who churns out screen after screen of essential visual data over many months at a time?  

I was using Pride and Prejudice as my novel-word-count anchor,  a novel with 122,189 words.  I figured out that in my 3 years of roleplay, such as they were, and within my SL presence generally since 2012, I almost achieved what RaeLeeH has achieved in the forums alone. 

Well, let's see... 9 years on SLU and close to 20k posts. Before that I don't know how many years on the SciFi Channel (not SyFy) bboard with well over 10k posts... call it 5 years. Toss in roughly 5k posts per miscellaneous bboard... call that, oh say, 35k. Now add in all the years of RP in AW (over 5) and about 10 years in SL. I do tend to para RP but not long drawn out ones. I don't usually need more than 3 - 5 lines...

Whew! That's a lot of novels/novellas. I'll let you do the math.

[Madelaine McMasters]

14 minutes ago, GillianXRCR said:

I've not written anything that's a long novel...but I love writing short stories and poems if that counts.

If you write what counts
Your word count won't matter much
But your words sure will

Edited August 29, 2019 by Madelaine McMasters
I can't count!

[Eggy UwU]

4 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

If you write what counts
Your word count won't matter much
But your words sure will

Thank you. <3 You are 100% correct.

[Selene Gregoire]

4 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

If you write what counts
Your word count won't matter much
But your words sure will

Some of us can't quite seem to ever write what counts. At least, not in a way others understand it.

“Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so that the other half may reach you.”  ~Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam

[Love Zhaoying]

6 minutes ago, Selene Gregoire said:

Some of us can't quite seem to ever write what counts. At least, not in a way others understand it.

“Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so that the other half may reach you.”  ~Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam

How do we know which half to believe? Sounds like a Maddy quote.

[Love Zhaoying]

16 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

If you write what counts
Your word count won't matter much
But your words sure will

Let me write that down.

Wait, is it a Haiku?

Edited August 29, 2019 by Love Zhaoying

[Madelaine McMasters]

8 minutes ago, Selene Gregoire said:

Some of us can't quite seem to ever write what counts. At least, not in a way others understand it.

“Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so that the other half may reach you.”  ~Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam

My ex-hubby is a marketing/ad man. He loved to quote John Wannamaker's "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half". I wonder if Gibran knew which half of what he said is meaningless.

Don't worry about your ratio, Selene. Something is getting through.

:-).

[Madelaine McMasters]

10 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Let me write that down.

Wait, is it a Haiku?

If you only count syllables, yes!

[Tari Landar]

3 hours ago, Clarrellae said:

So, how many novels have you written? 

If you ask everyone else reading my unnecessarily verbose drivel, probably a million.

If you ask me, I'll probably tell you directions to Amtrak in Cleveland.

Gotta keep them guessing

 

[Selene Gregoire]

41 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Don't worry about your ratio, Selene. Something is getting through.

The wrong things are getting through. That's what bothers me.

[Madelaine McMasters]

1 minute ago, Selene Gregoire said:

The wrong things are getting through. That's what bothers me.

I don't think you can completely avoid being taken the wrong way. After decades of trying to appear more approachable, some people still find me intimidating. But that means some people don't!

[Selene Gregoire]

54 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

How do we know which half to believe? Sounds like a Maddy quote.

It's not a matter of belief, it's a matter of listening. Or rather, speaking and being heard but never listened to. That line in my sig means far more than it appears to.

Gibran had it right. People hear but they don't really listen. How did he know? Because he knew what parts he said were meaningless and what parts held meaning and he could tell by people's reactions to his words. Most reacted to the things that had no meaning and had no reaction to what did have meaning. I see what he saw, everywhere I go. RL and online.