Book Six, Renumbered!

I finished Meanwhile In Intersect at around 2 AM Tuesday.  Two days later I finished Gloom and Doom.  Today's project was Blessed and Cursed, which is a story that links the "dimensional adventures" section of the book (which is what I've been writing for the last 20 days) to the "outer space adventures" section of the book, which includes stories I wrote in April and a bunch that are plotted and only partially written.

Today I renumbered all of the stories in book six.  This was a bit of an undertaking.

I'm not exactly sure when I started numbering my stories.  At first I had only five.  Then I wrote two more.  Then I challenged myself to write a new story each day for NaNoWriMo in November of 2012.  It's easy to remember this date, because it was the last month that City of Heroes existed.  In fact, I'm pretty sure the announcement of the closure of City of Heroes on the last day of August 2012 was what spurred me to start writing Grandpa Anarchy stories again.  The character is based on one I made in the game, and even though I only played that character for a few levels, the idea behind the character stuck with me and a few years later I wrote my first few stories.

Throughout November 2012 I started a new story each day, and I eventually completed all of them by the  Spring of 2013.  I challenged myself to write a new story every week for 2013, and by the end of the year I had a ton of Grandpa Anarchy stories written.  At some point, I think it was the Summer of 2013, I started numbering the stories and laid out what I thought would be my first book and my second and third books.  I know that by August or September of 2013 I had enough stories to fill three books, and I'd gone back through the stories in the first book to rework them and in some cases break stories that didn't work into 2 or 3 separate stories.  In the spring of 2014 I did Camp NaNoWriMo and wrote quite a few more stories.  I've tried to add more stories every year, but when it came to Camp NaNoWriMo for April 2016 I tried something different.

I had an idea to do a "Secret Crisis Wars" kind of story in which Grandpa's universe gets rebooted, and things get changed around, then they reboot again and maybe change everything back at the end.  I had another idea involving a "Doom Patrol" kind of supergroup.  By January 2016 I had tossed these and a few other ideas into a folder for the proposed sixth book, Weird Tales of Weird Anarchy.  And when April came around I worked on this.  I only got a few stories done, but I had a numbered sequence of stories for my book by then.  Then I inserted several stories into the sequence and had to renumber everything.  I did that a couple of times.

When I picked up the thread again in July I was having some problems with what I'd written and planned to write.  My original idea had included Grandpa and company getting tossed out into space, but then in Legal Eagle I'd had them attack a creature that teleports people to random dimensions.  And then, for reasons unexplained, in the next story Strike the Worm they did not wind up in another dimension, but wound up on a different planet in this dimension, and had a lot of adventures in space but in this dimension (mostly only planned or half-written to date).

But!  I had also written Happy Jack in which they wound up in the interdimensional city of Intersect, and I had written a bit on my "Doom Patrol" story which placed it in Intersect as well.  How did they wind up in other dimensions?  I was planning for this to all happen later after the space adventures, but ultimately it made a lot more sense that the events in Legal Eagle which promised to send them to another dimension actually did so.  Rather than jump directly from Legal Eagle to Strike the Worm, I should toss in a few stories of their adventures in other dimensions, and even move up Happy Jack and Gloom and Doom to happen during this sequence, before they wound up back in regular space.  This would be my "Dimensions Arc" which came before the "Space Arc".

Thus I started inserting stories early into my numbered list.  I would number them "175.5" and "179a, 179b, 179c, 179d" etc.  I was also adding stories from the very beginning involving a plot hatched against Grandpa Anarchy that involved the League of Former Sidekicks, so there were a lot of new stories to insert into the early part of the list.  Eventually I had 14 stories that I was trying to insert between other number storie,s and it became a real mess.  After finally finishing Gloom and Doom last night (my "Doom Patrol" tribute story), I finally had a list of completed stories that stretched from the beginning of the book right up to Strike the Worm. I had one possible story left to write, and I also needed a bridge story to explain how we get from the end of Gloom and Doom to the start of Strike the Worm.  Once those two stories were written, I could begin to rework and finish all of the "Space Arc" stories.  So it seemed like as good a time as any to renumber everything.

My new story order:

178  Opportunity of a Lifetime
179  Shadow Secrets
180  Superpowered Self Defense
181  Eclipsed In Time
182.  Legal Eagle
183  Chaos and Order
184  Status Report
185  Prison World
186  Happy Jack
187  The Wight Stuff
188  Meanwhile in Frosthaven
189  Meanwhile in Intersect
190  Meanwhile in Zendeth Sector (in progress)
191  Meanwhile on Planet Zorlthrax X9
192  Gloom and Doom
193  Blessed and Cursed
194  Strike the Worm
195  The Nonhumans
196  Painted Into A Corner
197  Bombs Away (in progress)
198  Intergalactic Order of Space Babes  (in progress)
199  Girl Gravity  (in progress)
200  Green-Skinned Alien Babe (in progress)
201  Llahna's Girl  (in progress)
202  The Further Adventures of Grandpa Anarchy  (in progress)
203  Punchathon (in progress)

212  Above the Law
213  Muse
214  Complete (in progress)

217  X Factor  (in progress)