Literary Statistics
Tonight, for a project that I'll describe later, I put together an inventory of my fiction writing, i.e., those stories and things authored by Jay Neal, my pen-name for fiction. I found things to interest me; your mileage will undoubtedly vary.
One thing : I'll refer to "stories", but it's a bit difficult to say exactly what is a "story". I include in my count a few incidental pieces, one of which is only 144 words long but that I'm rather proud of, but the longest, at about 7,000 words, is decidedly a short story. Most of them are stories of roughly 3,000 words, a length that was thought optimal for the magazines I wrote for for several years. So, while they're not all quite stories, they're all literary oeuvre clearly in Jay Neal's hand. The average length is 3,250 words.
My first story I slogged through finishing in December 1998. What I remember about it was that, with my 3,000-word target in mind, I put all the words into it I could think of and sweated and thought and typed and ended up with … about 1,200 words! Talk about demoralizing. But I rethought it from the beginning and redid the story, ending up with a new, improved, 3,500-word version. Phew. That story turned out to be a warm-up for writing a story that I'd long been thinking about but hadn't found a way to tell it, but with the narrative ice broken I did find a way into the story and I'm still happy with the result.
Story #4, "A Bedtime Story", was a fairy-tale / fable that came out very nicely but was anything but smooth writing — Isaac can attest that I screamed at the computer frequently trying to get it to behave. It's been in print on three occasions so far, my most-published story and a sentimental favorite for many of us.
Story #5 I wrote for the anthology Bearotica, edited by R. Jackson (happily, recently back in print thanks to Bear Bones Books and Lethe Press). With this one, called "Blade" after one of the central characters, I expanded my horizon out to 5,000 words, which gave me some good scope to examine what turned out to be two very interesting characters: a middle-aged, suburban, white-bread gay man, and a barely legal, street-smart punk, who happen to find themselves attracted to each other. At least I found them interesting! It also was the start of a very productive relationship with a very understanding and supportive editor and collaborator that continues to this day.
Well, I don't need to go on right now about each story when all I was going to do was mention some statistics.
In total, there are 40 stories (pieces, oeuvres, etc.). Of those there are 7 that have had no public airing — I put it that way because 2 have been published online and one, in the form of a short play, was given a public reading some years back. The rest (30) have been printed on paper in some form, either magazine or anthology, for a total of 39 publications events (i.e., seven have been printed twice, one has been printed three times).
The number that fascinates me, though, is that together these 40 completed things contain 129,970 words. Not so much, really, compare to quite a number of authors — I'm a very slow writer at fiction and I don't focus my attention on it as often as I'd like. Still, it seems a bit of a marvel to me.
Oh yes, I still write, and I still quite like to write fiction. Not to mention that there are at least half a dozen stories in my mental queue, waiting to be put down slowly on paper (literally, since I generally write on paper with a fountain pen). Also not to mention that I have a story in progress that I really should be working on right now rather than writing this.
Ah well, so many words, so many ideas, so little time.