I've been working on Girl's School for the last month. This is a Ranma 1/2 fanfiction story, and the most massive story I've ever worked on. It is more than 500,000 words in total, including parts that are not completely written. I believe I've added about 25,000 or 30,000 words to the story this past month.
First, let's start with my fanfiction adventures.
I started writing Ranma 1/2 fanfiction in the early 2000's, maybe a few years earlier. I can't remember exactly. I was a big fan of Ranma 1/2 at the time, and I wrote a bunch of short stories and several longer works. The longest of these which was actually complete was called Monkey Head-Butting, and was a body-swap story. I also had several unfinished stories, including a 5-part story for which I wrote the first 4 parts and then just never managed to finish part 5, called I Can See Clearly Now, and a very long, open-ended story called Muyami Academy, which I had intended to continue writing but eventually abandoned.
Basically, I was really good at imagining open-ended stories which were much more massive than I ever had the time to write. Muyami Academy involved nearly every high school anime character from a series I liked attending the same weird high school. I liked it, but it was a massive undertaking that continued to spiral out of control as I worked on it. I'm not sure how long it was, my old files are .doc files that I can't open at the moment, although most of it is uploaded to fanfiction.net.
Along the way I started an open-ended story called A Brief Bit of Insanity that I never finished; I started a story called Both Halves that I intended to write more on, but didn't; I wrote the first couple chapters of a Ranma 1/2 next-generation story about the Saotome kids (and the kids of the other characters) called Seven Fiancees, which I always wanted to continue, but I haven't; and I also sketched out a couple of massive story ideas that I was wise enough to never actually publish, because I wasn't going to finish those, either.
One of these was called Imaginary Knights Dimsdale. This was also a Ranma 1/2 spinoff story, and really, this was an isekai story that I plotted years before isekai stories were a big thing. (Isekai stories being ones where the hero or heroes are transported to another world, or reincarnated in a new world after their death [which, like, 75% of the time involves saving someone from a runaway truck and dying in their place].) In my story, the Ranma 1/2 cast are summoned to a fantasy world to help stop a great evil and save a kingdom, but they are transformed into other anime characters. The idea was that they were given avatar bodies, and if they died, they would wind up back in their own world again, no worse for wear. But really it was another body-swap scenario that I dreamed up. I remember Ranma was going to wind up in the body of Lum from Uresei Yatsura. Anyway, it was a massive, massive story that luckily I didn't write very much of.
I had another one of these stories called Nerima All-Stars, in which the cast from Ah! My Goddess were guides helping the cast of Ranma 1/2 to adjust to a super hero version of their world. One was going to be a sentai hero with a super suit, one was going to be the avatar of Thor, one would be a master magician, one would be a magical girl, etc. I wrote the opening scenes that set things up, and even read them at a writer's night for my friends, and then I set that one aside, too, because it was another massive undertaking that I didn't want to get into at that moment.
Because the story that I did want to get into was a story called Girl's School.
The idea behind this story was simply that Ranma would be forced to attend a school for girls -- St. Hebereke's School for Girls, in fact, the one Kodachi Kuno attends. I wrote the opening for this story, and set it aside, and forgot about it completely, and then rediscovered it and I thought: I need to write more of this. So I did, and the story grew in scope. In November of 2008, I made this my NaNoWriMo project, and that month I wrote over 52,000 words, starting with chapter 16 and working my way towards chapter 24.
The next year I did this again, only by this point I'd been struck with a weird new idea: what if Ranma and company became magical girls? This would have to take place in the future of my story, but for NaNoWriMo 2009 I wrote another 52,000 words that comprised chapters 40-42 (estimated). In these, Ranma and company not only become magical girls but take on multiple contracts t hat lead to three long adventures in other worlds.
In 2010 I wrote 55,000 words on Girl's School, chapters 25-28, trying to write my way forward to the magical girl chapters. In 2011 I attempted to write more to fill in the gaps, but that year I failed and only wrote about 11,000 words.
In 2012 my project for NaNoWriMo was to write Grandpa Anarchy short stories. This has been an on and off concern of mine ever since, which normally prevents me from working on my fan fiction stories. I've written more than 400 Grandpa Anarchy stories since 2012.
However in 2013 I used NaNoWriMo to again work on Girl's School, and filled in more of the gaps and even began working on the third of the otherworld adventures, which was the biggest one of the three. I added 55,000 words to my story. After that I spent a lot of time writing more Grandpa Anarchy stories, but in 2015 I again set to work on my massive fanfiction story, adding another 70,000 words.
At this point my story is stored in seven files: Part 1 is chapters 1-15, and is 70,000 words. Part 2 is chapters 16-24, and is 75,000 words. Part 3 is chapters 25-34 and is 91,000 words. Part 4 is chapters 35-40 and is 85,000 words. (Note: I've published through chapter 38 on Fanfiction.net). Part 5 is chapters 41-43, and is 61,000 words. And Part 6, which is the section I'm still working on, covers chapters 44-50 and at the moment is 122,000 words, although that includes maybe 10,000 words of research material at least, which is only temporarily added to the file.
And if that's not enough, I have a Part 7 file covering everything that I've envisioned and partially written that comes after the third magical girl adventure, and that file is approximately 50,000 words.
Now, after 2015 I was a bit burned out on the story that never ended, and I took a break to work on other things, although I would pick it up now and again. Before this last month, I last worked on it around 2018 or 2019, but I hadn't written a ton on it since 2015. But I still wanted to finish the magical girl adventure chapters, and publish everything I had up to that point.
However, in the meantime I decided in November 2016 to do something different. I picked up my weird Ranma-and-company-as-superheroes story, Nerima All-Stars, and work on it for NaNoWriMo that year. As per usual, I grossly underestimated how long this story would be. I mean, characters wake up in a world filled with superheroes, a villain arises, they learn how to use their powers and fight him and win -- I can fit that in 50,000 words, yes? I mean, I had plans for more than one villain to appear, but at least the first big showdown I could manage in 50,000 words?
Well... no, I could not. I wrote 57,000 words that year, and by that point I'd decided that Ranma needed to travel to the Slayers universe to learn how to be a sorcerer, and Akane should visit heaven to learn how to science like a goddess of the future by learning from the same master, and... these turned into huge side-story detours on the way to my main showdown with the big bad guy.
The next year I skipped anime fanfiction and worked on Grandpa Anarchy stories for NaNoWriMo, but in 2018 I attempted to work on Nerima All-Stars again and hopefully finish it. I failed to write anything that year, and I attacked it again in 2019, and wrote another 62,000 words. This did not finish my story however, and in 2020 I returned to it again and wrote another 51,000 words.
This means that my story that I was going to manage in 50,000 words is now 183,000 words long, and needs at least 50,000 words more to wrap up. So that's my goal for this November.
I haven't published any of Nerima All-Stars yet, because I'm a little smarter in my old age and I wanted a complete story before I published it. And granted, this will still be an open-ended story in that I can always start another villain up and write another chapter to the story -- but I don't actually plan to do that, for now. I just want to get the story to a possible conclusion, and publish it. Keep in mind that this is another story that I started writing in the early 2000's.
In the meantime, I've spent the month of September working on Girl's School. I was hoping to get chapters 48, 49, and 50 written and that would complete my entire third magical girl arc. Instead I've managed to complete chapter 48, written about half of chapter 49, and, well, that's where I'm at. I think I've written about 25,000 words total, which isn't bad. But I'm still nowhere near the end.
