The Micro Story Writing Process

 I've written 50+ micro stories of 500 characters or less this month.  My goal was to average 1 per day, which I've easily exceeded.  Although I haven't worked on any of my other writing, I feel pretty accomplished.  And for that reason I'm going to keep writing these stories -- I feel good every time I'm able to fit an idea into only 500 characters, and if I get it just right then I enjoy rereading it even weeks later.  When I post, I always get a few likes from other people so I know the stories worked for them as well, and it's something that I can manage in half an hour -- unlike trying to add to my massive 200,000 word fan fiction story Nerima All-Stars, which requires me to regularly reread what I've written so I can remember all of the balls I'm trying to juggle.  ^_^

I find the entire writing process fascinating and mysterious.  Typically I have an idea and I write it out, and it's too many words, too many characters, and then I have to edit it down.  I really enjoy this part because you're trying to figure out how to include the most detail in the fewest number of words -- it's a nice little writing puzzle.

Two days ago I had an idea for a story about a person transitioning into a new life in a new world -- just the idea of the transition itself.  I wrote it out, and it was well over 650 characters long.  Which meant I needed to trim a LOT.

I began with "What are the advantages?"  "You'll get a new life in a new world.  You get to choose who you will become."  When I set about editing, I collapsed these two lines into a single statement:  "The advantage is a new life in a new world.  You choose who you will become."  Much more compact.  Likewise, I had a couple of lines about him being strapped in... to some sort of machine that facilitated the transfer to a new world.  Then I had the new person stepping out into sunlight on another world.

I wanted the ending to be the surprise in not remembering who they'd been, but it was hard to fit everything into 500 characters.  Finally I decided that part of the problem was  trying to include being strapped into a machine and then awaking in a new world -- it took too many words.  Just have them step through a portal, and into sunlight, and that was enough to convey the transfer from one world to the next. That gave me just enough room to include a bit about trying to remember the past.

"The advantage is a new life in a new world.  You choose who you will become."

"And the disadvantages?"

"You leave your old life behind -- your friends,  family... and  memories.  You won't recall who you were."

He was old, with few friends.  A new start was enticing.  He signed the paperwork, and stepped through the gateway... and into bright sunlight.

She froze.  What had she been thinking?  Memories drifted then vanished like morning mist.  She could not recall.

The next day, I had an idea involving time travel.  I was thinking about how tiny mistranslations in a sacred text could turn into huge holy wars in the future.  I'm not just talking about the Bible -- for example, if the United States founding fathers had more carefully spelled out what they meant about the right to bear arms in the 2nd amendment, we might not have people carrying assault rifles into a Starbucks to order a latte.  It's tempting to think, if you could just travel back in time, you could save a lot of lives by changing how someone wrote down a few words.

So I started by writing:  Brother Ignacius studied the parchment by candlelight.  This was an X, was it not?

With a flash, a stranger stood before him.  Brother Ignacius fell to his knees.  "An angel!" he exclaimed.

"I'm not an angel," the man replied.  "I am a traveler in time.  That word is not X, it's X."

Normally I try to pick names that are shorter than "Brother Ignacius" because of space considerations, but that name felt right for a Middle Ages or earlier monk.  My two biggest problems were that I hadn't decided what my mistranslation would be just yet, and I wasn't exactly sure how to end the story.  My first ending just had the traveler imparting his knowledge and Brother Ignacius was like, thanks for telling me, and that ending didn't have any surprise or twist to it.  Then I considered having Ignacius consider telling this story to the abbot, but no, he would never believe it -- which was a slightly better ending, but not one I could fit into 500 characters.

I tried researching mistranslations, which first yielded a lot of stories about presidents and Soviet leaders giving speeches that were not translated well, then yielded pages that talked about how the Bible is full of translation errors, but didn't give specific examples.  Finally I landed on the Wikipedia page for Bible errata, which deals with weird translation errors (and is the basis for some jokes in Good Omens that I was half-remembering).  This lead me to the treacle bible, in which a Hebrew word that could mean balm or medicine was translated as treacle -- which at the time also could mean cure-all.

That was what I needed, because the word treacle is inherently funny and specific words always trump general ideas.  I could refer to the "treacle wars of 2300, in which millions died" and you didn't really have to know the details of how a holy war turned on a mistranslated word, you'd get the general idea.

I also wrote a line along the lines of, "I understand," said Brother Ignacius, who in fact did not.  And I immediately liked that idea and that line.  Why should a medieval monk, even if he's convinced that this angel is really just a human, understand in any way how a simple word choice could lead to millions of lives being lost in the future?  So that became part of my ending.

Brother Ignacius studied parchment by candlelight.  This word meant treacle, did it not?

With a flash, a stranger stood before him.  "An angel!"  Ignacius exclaimed, falling to his knees.

"Not an angel," the man replied.  "I am a traveler in time.  Please translate that word as 'balm'.  Doing so will prevent the Treacle Wars of 2300, in which millions died."

"I see," replied Ignacius, who did not.  The man vanished.  Ignacius shrugged.  Treacle, balm - what was the difference?

 I really like working out what makes the best ending, and how I can manage to fit it into 500 characters.  ^_^

Here's my last story:  over the past week and a half, for several days when I walked into my bathroom, I could sometimes hear someone filing on metal.  It sounded like someone was slowly sawing through a steel pipe.  I live on the ground floor of an apartment building, so it wasn't coming from below me (although I had visions of someone trying to break into my apartment from underneath).  It was most likely coming from the apartment next door, but I never did find out what it was.  It eventually stopped.

I was thinking about that this morning, and I decided to write a story around the idea.  So this morning I wrote:

He heard scratching and pounding through the walls of his bathroom, as if someone were trying to break through.  His house was set apart, down a lonely lane -- there could be no one on the other side.  He ignored the noise.

One day he heard a faint voice calling, "Let me out!"

But he knew there was no one there, so he ignored this as well.

As you can see, I have yet to figure out what the ending should be.  ^_^  The voice fades away?  Something breaks through from another dimension?  The police show up?  I'm still trying to figure out where this one leads. 

Micro Stories

 I've started writing micro stories.  I'm posting one a day to my Mastodon account, @vanellopemint@home.social.  (I recently found out that home.social may close down this year.  :(  It seemed like such a stable instance!)

Anyway, I've been fascinated by microfiction for quite a while.  For years I've followed two accounts on Twitter that write within the 280-character Twitter limit, @microflashfic and @microsff.  The first account posted several times a day for over a year.  They've both collected into books, I believe.

I wanted to try doing this as well, but I was intimidated by writing a story within the 280 character limit.  It seemed like a very daunting task, an amazing trick.  I do write a lot of short stories -- usually 1,000 to 2,000 words -- but writing such a tiny story seemed impossible.

After the Musk invasion of Twitter, I moved to Mastodon where @microsff@mastodon.art also posts, and I followed several hashtags, #microfiction, #flashfiction, and #smallstories and discovered other people who do this, including @humpbuckletales@mastondon.social, @idle@writing.exchange and @neverworn@social.retrodon.net.  Mastodon allows for 500 characters which seemed more do-able to me.

On Monday May 1st I tried again to imagine a micro story, but came up with nothing.  I went to bed, and an idea finally popped into my head.  I got up and wrote a 200-word story involving Grandpa Anarchy, the hero I've written many stories about.  I was really proud of this -- I'd found one definition of micro fiction online that set the limit at 300 words or less.  But then I realized my 200-word story was over 1,200 characters -- far too long to fit into a Mastodon post.  So I went back to bed.

And then!  I got another idea for a very short story.  I got up and wrote it and published it, and I was very proud of myself.  I thought:  I can do this!

Carlos beheld a beautiful woman in flowing robes.  "I was struck by bus..."

"While saving someone," she said.  "It often happens."

His eyes widened.  "You're an isekai reincarnation goddess?"

She smiled.  "I send people into new worlds on new adventures."

"Like a Game Master who decides everyone's fate."  He sighed.  "I ran RPGs.  I'll miss that."

"But I never get my own adventure," she added.  "Unless...."

"Yes?"

"How would you like to be the new God of Second Chances...?"

The next day, I managed to write three more while at work.  I thought:  Hey, this isn't so hard!  I could maybe publish once a week!

The day after that, I wrote 8-9 more, and I realized I should probably try posting one story a day for the month of May.  So I posted two that night to catch up.

Thursday i wasn't able to write anything.  I had one idea in my head most of the day -- about vampires and garlic.  Why do they hate garlic?  It turns out one possible reason is that people thought vampirism was a disease of the blood, and garlic has antimicrobial abilities.  In other words, there's no intrinsic reason why vampires would hate garlic.

That seemed like good story material.  I could imagine a vampire that loves garlic bread, for example.  But I couldn't manage to turn that into a story.

In the evening I watched the rest of season 3 of Lower Decks, and that gave me ideas that also went nowhere.  Later I was trying to work out a story involving the plethora of secret organizations that supposedly rule the world from the shadows -- surely there was a joke in there somewhere that I could tell.

Maybe this is not as easy as I thought?

I woke up at 1:30 AM, and the idea for the story popped into my head, based on secret societies.  I immediately got up and jotted down the idea, lay back down, got back up and wrote the idea out, lay back down, got up and rework/edit more than once.  Finally I went back to sleep.

In the morning on the way to work I came up with another.  So!  Not so difficult after all!  That's one story for Thursday and one for Friday.  One a day is all I need to keep up.  ^_^

I've managed at least one micro story a day since -- sometimes 2-3.  At this point I'm 10 days in and I've written about 24 stories, so I'm well on my way to doing one a day for at least a month.  I can probably do this for several months at least.  Could I do it for a full year?  I guess we'll find out.  ^_^

Some are better than others.  One story I posted late last week got about 25 likes/boosts.  This counts as viral for me on Mastodon.  :D  I was lucky that a person with a large following boosted me, and that exposed me to many more people than normal.

You might not think 24 likes sounds like much, but when I was lying on my bed my desktop computer would beep, followed by my iPad, my iPhone, and then the old iPhone that I use for playing Pokemon Go.  So it was a lot of beeps each time someone liked and boosted.  ^_^

"Become a hero?" the girl exclaimed.  "Defeat the Dark Lord?  No thanks!  I'd rather run a bookstore!"

As she left, Miardolyn the wizard said, "Apologies, Lord.  Summoning an otherworldly hero who truly wishes to be one is daunting."

Lord Danozlan nodded.  "The previous one became a cook."

"Do not despair, Lord!" Miardolyn drew a new circle.  "I shall try yet again!"

"Please," said the Dark Lord.  "If we find not a hero to defeat me, I must conquer the world.  Who wants that?"

I average 2-4 likes/boosts per post.  But a story I posted a few days later got no likes or boosts until near the end of the day, when my friend Matt liked it.  Well at least I know someone looked at it!  The story I posted the next morning had several likes/boosts in the first hour so I know people are reading, just not every one is a banger.

I've cross-posted some of them to Hive Social as well.  Maybe I should post to Tumblr.  I haven't left Twitter completely but I refuse to post there anymore.

In other writing news, I wrote very little Grandpa Anarchy fiction last year.  In November I worked on my fan fiction novel called The Nerima All-Stars.  Afterwards, I decided to give up on writing Grandpa Anarchy stories and try to finish my novel instead.  That... hasn't happened.  I've got a bit of writing on it done in the past few months, but not as much as I'd like.  I wrote only a couple of scenes in April, I think.

Down the Storm God Rabbit Hole

 

I'm still working on my fanfiction story that has been my main focus for the last several November NaNoWriMo's, titled the Nerima All-Stars.  I generally don't work on it except around NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writer's Month) time, but I want to try and finish it and get it published so that I don't have to think about it anymore.   That means working on it in December as well, and probably January and February.

I haven't written much since Dec 1st, but I picked it back up this week.  I was thinking:  every character ought to have something they're passionate about.  This was advice that I'd read recently, and it makes sense, it makes your characters more interesting and memorable.  And I have this one character in my story, her name is Jin -- she's a storm controller, but she's kept her abilities a secret her whole life.

And -- what I'd written so far, she really didn't stand out.  I imagined her as a kind of mousey recluse who worked from home and did most of her socializing online.  But I had figured out what she was passionate about, it just didn't come through in my writing.  Jin is a fan of a made-up magical girl anime series called Mahou Shoujo Stormbringer Akari.  She owns figurines and drama cds and all kinds of merchandise from the show, and she even writes Akari fanfiction.  I had decided that when her house gets destroyed, along with her precious collection, this would be a dramatic moment when she decides to unleash her power over storms and weather, to announce herself to the world, to "fight back" at the villain who was mostly responsible for this destruction.

The problem was, I had failed to write her as actually passionate about this anime.  At first she didn't even mention it.  Later I had her mention it in an off-hand manner, but this was hardly good enough.  A true fan will talk about the show, compare things to the show, quote the show, say things like, "this is just like that episode where Akari did X!"  When you meet her, you should learn at least this one thing about her.

Of course, it's hard to refer to a show you know nothing about.  What do I know about Mahou Shoujo Stormbringer Akari?  Her name is Akari.  She controls weather.  She's a magical girl.  That's it, and that's all in the title.  I knew literally nothing more.

So I decided to work on background info for my made-up anime show.  Often, working on background info is a way for me to "start writing" before I actually add to the story.  It's always useful in the end.

I gave Akari a full name -- Akari Harada, and I came up with two names for her best friends.  I came up with the name of a local police officer, a young man she is infatuated with.  Then I needed her major enemy.  "The Queen of Storms", I thought.  A weather-controller magical girl who battles with a weather-controller villain, why not?  As for a name?  I'd been picking names at random from lists of Japanese first names and surnames, but a villain required something more unusual.  Like, all of the villains in Sailor Moon are named after gemstones.  I needed something like that.

I decided that "Montana, Queen of Storms" sounded good.  Why not name her after a U.S. state?  It sounded like an anime thing to do.  Her minions could be other states -- not Washington of course, and not California, that's too famous.  How about Arizona, Colorado, and Dakota?  I imagined they were like the three storms from Big Trouble in Little China -- Wind, Rain, Thunder.  Dakota of the Wind.  Yeah.

So far I had some basic details but didn't know much about the story or the background of the character.  I decided, maybe she's the daughter of a storm god, and that's where her powers come from.  So I did some research.  Raijin is the Japanese storm god; he always appears with his brother Fujin.  He's kind of a trickster god, kind of associated with death and destruction.  That doesn't sound like a great father figure, although of course while storms bring death and destruction, rain also brings forth life so there are two sides to his character.  But he also has a son who is a storm god as well, Raitaro.

So I figured, maybe Akari is the child of Raitaro.  There's not a lot of information on him really, he's just the son of the thunder god, so Akari might be better thought of as the granddaughter of the storm god.  In Japan, I think "storm god" usually just means Raijin.

There's also a storm beast called Raiju, who appears as a lightning wolf or dog but also as just about any other animal in existence.  So, her magical girl guide/companion would be a cute puppy named Raiju, or a puppy who was a raiju but not necessarily the raiju.

So far so good!  I wrote up a short paragraph about how Akari grew up, and how she discovered that she's really the granddaughter of the storm god (Raiju shows up and tells her of course), and she is forced to become a magical girl and battle with evil forces (who are also mostly storm based).

But there was also a paragraph about Raijin that compared him to other storm gods -- they all have similar powers and tempermants.  It compared him to Leigong, Chinese god of thunder, and to Parjanya, Hindu god of rain, thunder, and lightning.  It compared him to Thor (Norse god), Zeus (Greek) and Taranis (Celtic).  And also to El, or YHWH, who historically was a Semitic storm deity before he evolved into the god of everything.

My first thought was:  Oh, she needs to discover other daughters or granddaughters of other storm gods!  That would be cool!  Let's just go all in in the weather controller thing!  So I came up with names:  Penelope, a granddaughter of Zues; Damini, a granddaughter of Parjanya, and Keshet, who was descended from the Hebrew storm god.

And then I was like -- do I really want to declare a character the daughter or granddaughter of Yaweh?  I was well familiar with  the idea that Yaweh was a storm god first, and god of everything later.  But did I want to treat the Christian god as just another mythological deity?

I did some research on Yaweh the storm god, and I was still debating whether to do it when I realized that I've really fallen too far down the rabbit hole.  This is a side character to a fake anime that will only be mentioned in passing in my story because one fairly minor character is a fan of said anime.  Like, let her be the grandchild of Yaweh, it's not going to even get mentioned in my story anyway!

I still need to come up with a few key phrases that Stormbringer Akari regularly says, some "In the name of the Moon, I shall punish you!" mojo, but for the most part I have my anime background.  I realized part way through this that I can just make the rest up as I go along.  Saying "This is just like that time Akari battled the demon Zograag in the Rainbow Kingdom!" does not require me or anyone to know anything about the anime episode in question, and the more outlandish the situation referenced the better.  I can borrow famous scenes or battles from other anime or movies or science fiction shows or whatever, change the names, and it will sound like this magical girl has had some outlandish adventures that we will never get to know anything more about.

So... mission accomplished I guess?  Now I actually need to rework actual scenes and dialogue in my actual story... you know, real writing.

NaNoWriMo 2022, and the Wrong Way to Write a Plot

 

I haven't written much about my writing this year, and in part that's because I've accomplished very little in my writing.  I've struggled on and off to rework or move forward on my current Grandpa Anarchy Story Arc, but it's been very difficult and at most I've rewritten parts of stories or completed a few paragraphs on this or that story, and that's all I've managed for most of the year.

I really wanted to work on NaNoWriMo though, and I wanted to "finish" my unpublished fanfic story Nerima All-Stars.  I tried to work on it in September and October, but I really wasn't able to get anything accomplished until NaNoWriMo started.  The pressure of getting something written every day for NaNoWriMo has helped kick-start my writing and to date I'm behind but cruising along and I think I'll be able to manage 50,000 words in the next few days.

So let's talk about this story, because as always I'm trying to feel my way forward with the plot.

The story, in short:  some gods and goddesses and one demon decide to play a "superhero" game where they transform a Ranma 1/2 world into the kind of universe where superheroes exist.  Then they each pick one of the main characters to transform into a hero, while the two people on the "bad" team get to pick someone to become a supervillain.

This was the entire idea for my original story, which consisted of the first few scenes as setup, and which I wrote quite a few years ago -- more than twenty years ago now.  Originally I thought, I'll make a few heroes, we'll have a fight, maybe I'll write sequels involving one or two more villains.  But when I finally decided to work on the story in earnest, it became evident that I was incapable of writing even one single battle with a villain that didn't take me multiple years to write.  Currently my document is over 250,000 words and I'm not close to done -- although this does include a lot of research notes at the end of the document, because NaNoWriMo.

My story takes some weird twists and turns that probably do not make for a good way to tell a tale, but I keep following my instincts and writing what seems best to me at the moment.  To whit:

I set my heroes up to fail, because I knew it would be funniest if Ranma Saotome was supposed to somehow become a sorcerer supreme and Akane Tendo was meant to be the next Tony Stark/Iron Man.  Then I wrote the inevitable confrontation with the villain, and of course they failed.  That's okay, heroes aren't supposed to succeed at first -- but I began to realize that there was no believable way to transform Ranma into a competent sorcerer in just a few weeks. He couldn't believe in himself enough to overcome his shortcomings.  Same for the other characters.

So i wrote a very long chapter in which Ranma is placed in another universe where he can spend ten years learning magic.  This seemed like a workable solution, and I enjoyed writing it, and it involved Lina Inverse which was fun because Lina and Ranma make a fun combination (and they had the same voice actress in Japan, so there's one drawing of Lina where they gave her a long braid and leaned into the Ranma resemblance).  But!  This chapter is kind of a side-step narratively -- instead of dealing with the main plot, now we're going off to another world and having some adventures there.

But I enjoyed writing it and I assume it will be fun to read.  This became Chapter Six of my story, titled Sorceress.  Yet that only fixed things for one character.  I had to come up with something to explain why Akane and Nabiki suddenly got much better as well, so I wrote two more very long chapters involving them doing something similar -- I stuck them in heaven to learn their powers, again as a kind of "time here doesn't count back on earth" setup.  These were Chapter Seven:  Temporary Goddess, and Chapter Eight:  Spider's Web and Shattered Globe.

Two years ago I was working hard on Chapter Nine:  Time Stands Still, which I had planned to be the next "real" chapter in the story, but I had a lot of plot threads to tie up from my previous two chapters and so this chapter became a third straight chapter of things happening up in heaven with all of the characters there.

So my story does not flow in a very direct manner, plot-wise.  We have four long chapters where characters go off to other places to become good at what they do, before a final showdown with the villain.  But I really thought that after this we would dive right into the big conflict.

As I wrote Chapter Ten:  Asleep in Nerima, I came to realize that just explaining how all of the heroes prepared for the big fight was a chapter in itself.  So I still wasn't even to the point of the actual battle.  I've rewritten this chapter and rearranged things a few times, and I did some of that this November, but I think the chapter's pretty firm as written right now.

I've been working on Chapter Eleven:  One Night in Nerima.  Last year I did a few scenes that take place at the start of the final battle, so to speak, but in the meantime it had become apparent to me that my heroes had become immensely powerful in the last several chapters, and I would need to also explain why  the villain was powerful enough to still be a threat to them.  So I came up with yet ANOTHER time manipulation trick, in which the villain has a sorceress place the heroes within a time bubble, which gives him about three months with no interference during which he takes over Tokyo and most of Japan.

And... I was originally just going to have them wake up next day and discover that all of this has happened.  But it seemed to me that I should document his rise to power a bit.  It gives me a chance to show how he becomes powerful, and what his allies are capable of, before the final fight.

That's the current chapter I've been working on, and until recently I was struggling to write it.  It wasn't interesting.  I decided that this was because there were no sympathetic characters to follow, and I had two that I could write about -- Akane's friend Yuka, and a storm controller named Lady Leviathan who really just wants to be left alone.  So I tried writing chapters involving these two, and this included going all the way back to chapter three or four, so that I could introduce my storm controller as a character who just might have some interesting abilities, and establish that she and Yuka had met.

I wrote a few scenes, and it was still pretty boring.  Yuka hides out in a library.  She lives on the streets.  She evacuates to a shelter when Nerima is placed under a state of emergency.  She meets Lady Leviathan again, and they talk.  All very boring.

One of my problems was that I've written scenes in which Yuka finds her friend Sayuri in a bombed-out Nerima, and Sayuri is dying, and at this point she is offered power by a demon and decides to accept in order to save her friend's life.  And I was having trouble figuring out why she goes back into Nerima after she's already evacuated.  I mean, she wants to save her friend, but then why hasn't she tried to do so before now?

And I told myself, the way to make a story interesting is to imagine what's the worst thing that can happen to your character, and try doing that.  I was writing Yuka as being a reasonable citizen -- avoiding any confrontation.  She can't save her friend, so why have her even try?  Well, because that's more interesting, yes?  

So I came up with a secondary reason for her to return to the Tendo Dojo, where the villain is holding court, and suddenly the story was more interesting again.  And I thought, what if she accidentally discovers Akane's secret base?  And that sounded interesting, so I did that.  She escapes from certain capture by finding the entrance to the base in the back of Akane's closet.  Then I thought, what's the worst that can happen now?  The villain's henchmen -- a demonic assassin and a powerful sorceress -- get into the base.  So I did that.

Then I had to figure out how Yuka avoids becoming ensnared a second time.  The base has an A.I. that controls several spare suits of armor, and there's a robot there as well, and they help fight the villains and allow for Yuka to escape.  Behind her, the base explodes, which prevents the villains from following her.  

Anyway, I think I've crafted a more interesting story -- at the very least, it was more fun for me to write.  It's turning my "Dr. Pineapple takes over Japan" chapter into a massive section of the story that might need to be broken up into 2-3 chapters, but if it's interesting then I guess that's okay?

2021 Wrapup

 So for 2021, I wrote:

413  I Swear

414  Collateral Damage

415  I, Gardener

416  Maid Ex Machina

417  Infinite Dojo

418  Princess of Pluto

419  The Return of Normal

042  Hot Stuff

420  Get Down Tonight

421  Free Advertising

422  Inevitable

423  All I Ever Wanted

424  A Different Me  (formerly My Clone Sleeps Alone 2)

427  Girl Squared

432  Wrong Number

436  Doomscrolling

433  Endorsement

435  Transformations

437  Frills and Bows

438  Mating Ritual

449x  Afterglow  (moved to "unusable")

441  My Own Daughter

442  Ambassador

443  Real Girl

445  Academy

444  Hate Crime

446  Revenge

447  Powerslave

428  Amaranthine Shores

429  The Spice of Life

425  Buttercup

426  Chaos Theory

430  Good Vibrations

431  Woofy

434  Optimal Performance

439  For One Night

439b  Stranger Danger

440  What I Yam

461  Wisdom and Badassery

448  Library of Dreams

449  Tutti Frutti

Technically, I wrote a couple of other stories that were also retroactively tossed into the bin of "unusable" -- Mother's Treasure, Trust Mother, Orphan White.  But I hadn't listed those as completed stories because I rejected them almost immediately, while Afterglow was a story I considered good for several months before deciding I didn't like it at all.

So that's 41 Grandpa Anarchy stories last year, give or take.  I also wrote approximately 20,000 words on my fan fiction story Girl's School, and roughly 50,000 words on my fan fiction story Nerima All-Stars.  Neither reached a point where I was ready to publish anything, but progress is progress.  I only really wrote three Grandpa Anarchy stories after July, so most of what I accomplished in the second half of the year was that work on my fan fiction stories.

My goals for the coming year include getting both of those fan fiction stories to a point where I can publish what I have, and to write more Grandpa Anarchy stuff.  At the moment I've decided to backtrack and try to finish up some of my unfinished work, so I'm working my way through the stories in Book 12, A Bomb In Heaven.  I've completed one story so far and I'm completely rewriting another.

NaNoWriMo Day 2

 I spent Day 1 of NaNoWriMo just reading my story Nerima All-Stars.  It's some 150,000 words long.  The file is actually 177,000 words long, after I deleted some stuff, but this also includes a lot of research.

Things included in my research:

1.  An incomplete List of Heroes and Villains and their abilities

2.  An incomplete List of Gods and Goddesses used in the story.

3.  Magical Girl Spells

4.  "Regular" Magic Spells (pulled from Ah! My Goddess and Slayers)

5.  Magical Instruments Made of Bone.  (includes Maui's bone fish hook; the first kantele made by Väinämöinen; the magical harp in the Cruel Sisters / Twa Sisters ballad (I added names to everyone); and a reference to Sampson, who slew a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass.  In my story, this was actually a magical weapon made of bone.  ^_^

6.  The Doublet System in Ah! My Goddess explained

7.  Notes on Hawaiian Pidgen.

8.  Notes on how the Japanese government is structured and run and where it is located.

9.  TV Tropes article on Heroes vs. Villains

10.  Notes about the Völva, the Norse witch, and  the song Allison Gross.

*******************************SPOILERS************************************

Note that I am providing spoilers to a story that nobody has been allowed to read yet.  :P

At this point in my story, here is what has happened:

Thor, Urd, Skuld and Belldandy agree to a game with Loki Odinsson and Mara (a demon).

As a result, Ranma, Akane and the cast of Ranma 1/2 wind up in a superhero world overnight.

The god/goddess team pick four champions to become heroes, while Loki and Mara choose a suitable villain.  Early chapters involve training, but Loki cheats to get his villain up to speed.  Because of course he does.

Doctor Pineapple soon has all of Nerima under mind control, and that includes some of our heroes, and some other prominent heroes.  There's a fight, and the heroes manage to rescue their friends and escape.

At this point in the story, Urd, Skuld, Belldandy, and Thor decide to break the rules a little bit too.  Urd sends Ranma to the world of Slayers for ten years, and then returns him to Nerima just minutes after he left.  He's now a very skilled sorcerer.  The others send their charges away as well, allowing them to become highly skilled in mere moments.

All of this takes multiple chapters to detail, but finally we are all back where we were:  heroes holed up in a secret base, ready to fight Doctor Pineapple again, and much better prepared.

However, by this point other demons have taken an interest in what's going on, and Doctor Pineapple is able to trap the heroes in time for three months while his plan to take over Japan succeeds.

This is pretty much where I'd written to by the end of NaNoWriMo last year.  I had "several big fights and a final showdown" planned, but not really planned.  I hadn't really worked through what the villain would do, and how the heroes would respond.

To start with, Doctor Pineapple has three months to plan and knows when the heroes will be released from their time trap.  It would make sense to attack them immediately, before they have a chance to orient themselves.  However, many of his allies are mind-controlled heroes, and he can't send them against the heroes as long as those magical girls are able to break his enchantments.  So he'll want to assassinate the magical girls if he can, and/or send in only those who are willing allies, and those who he doesn't care about losing (lots of minions).  

IE I'm still at the planning stage.  ^_^  I've written about 1,300 words so far today in working out my plans, however.

October Writer's Update

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.