Eleven years ago I had one of those ideas where you tell your mate: Hold my beer...
The idea was to write a story in a foreign language. Now, I had done that before, writing some Star Trek fan fiction, but I wanted to try an original story. My initial idea was to write perhaps something like twenty chapters and one-hundred thousand words, which would have matched my longest Star Trek story. And all looked like I would do just that, except, one year into my work I fell badly ill and once recovered two years later, I got distracted by getting married for the first time at the tender young age of forty-three. By the time I felt like writing again in early 2024, my old account on this site had gone the way of the Dodo and couldn't be revived as I had no idea what kind of user data I had used eight years in the past. That meant - starting all over again.
Of course, surviving a life threatening illness and getting married for the first time, substantially changes a guy's perspective, so in hindsight, it was perhaps a blessing in disguise that the first version of my story sank into the abyss that is SOL's premium-only archive of aborted stories. That initial idea of writing 20 chapters looks almost funny in hindsight, as I have just posted Chapters 98 to 105, and the projected 100.000 words have been surpassed by a factor of five.
But now, after eleven years, and more than two years of extensive rewrite, I'm confident that I'm entering the home stretch now. The story began in 1988, has now progressed to the year 2001 and has always been slated to end in February 2002, so there are not too many chapters yet to come - ten, perhaps, tops.
Of course, when writing such a behemoth of a story, the characters take on a life of their own, and you feel like they are part of your life. That's why that story has spawned an entire universe, and no less than three supplementary stories, which are still work in progress. So, even though the day is already on the calendar - this year's calendar - when I will finally finish that story, its characters will live on, because I'm definitely not done yet.
Cheers,
The Horse With No Name.