For the Story is Long and Takes a Long Time
Every now and then I see a post float across my dash about younger folks (my lawn is a field of local plants and and drip watered, please enjoy) wanting an algorithm for AO3 or only wanting longer fic, or blah, blah. Not sure how much of that is pervasive and not folks grumping at the sky.
But this is the grumping at the sky site, so whatever.
Ever wondered what the labor involved in a long fic looks like? Wonder no longer, here's a line graph.
This represents the kind of sustained labor required to finish a maybe (I'm not done yet) 350k work.
It's not a single story. It's 18 stories from 18 POV that braid around similar (but not identical because people observe different things) events. It's OFMD modern AU.
Nothing is posted. I don't post unfinished stories. I learn too much while I write for that to ever work for me. Even if I have an outline.
Now you may wonder, how did I come up with graph? Probably not, but I'm going to explain anyway.
After working on and off on the project (the reason it doesn't start at zero) I decided to apply some techniques I use for project management. What I'm about to describe can be used for any type of complicated project.
Step 1
-Break the "project" down into milestones. 18 stories. I've also broken it down into 4 phases per story: 1) Write draft 1, 2) Edit, 3) Have you heard of 2nd edit? 4) Hopefully we're at Spag edit.
Step 2 -
Assign points to every milestone.
I use this sequence of #s*: 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34. Want to sound fancy. That's a Fibonacci Sequence. Now you know.
Using this numbering sequence keeps me from getting bogged down trying to decide if a big story is say 8 or 9 points if I were using a 1-10 sequence
The principle behind this kind of point assignment goes something like this. It's hard to look at Stede and know how tall he/the actor is. But if you look at Stede and Izzy standing together, I roughly know who is taller.
A - Or in this case, I guess the Stede story will be longer than Izzy's story. So Stede= 34, and Izzy=21.
B - Break down the phases of writing and assign them points.
3 Start writing. At the end of one week, figure out my points completed. Should be a % of the total possible points for that milestone/phase. My method involves a lot of formulas based on 20 years of project mangagement experience. You should just guess. Divide by 7. That's the "build" rate.
Divide the total number of points for the project by the build rate, that's the # of days it will probably take. That seem to long, establish an arbitrary date to finish and divide the number of points by that number of days and that's you're "Management Assigned an Arbitrary Date and I don't know if we can finish, but let's try" rate.
4 Keep writing and editing. Track as you go. Having a much smaller goal each day than "Finish it" to reach each day makes it easier to do. It's also easier than an arbitrary # of words a day, which, shrug, we're not Dickens. We're paid by the kudo, not the word.
Know how I know? I've been working on and off on this for 2 years. Here's what that (roughly) looks based on knowing how long I spent getting 4 of the stories thru writing and first edit by the time I got to March of this year. I file creation to last revision date, but not including the long periods in between writing, and knowing several times I had to remove huge amounts of writing. So, points went away. Sad sound.
That looks like this.
Brought to you by, I need to finish more points today, but am tired.
