Story Milestone - Lightbearers

Just completed another milestone for my most ambitious story. It's something I started writing in July of last year (I have a lot of unfinished old stories), and have been working on and off but fairly steadily every since. I hadn't intended to talk about it, but having just reached one of my milestones, I though it sounded like a good idea to keep some sort of record of the progress I'm making on it. Maybe that will ensure that I actually finish it, unlike a lot of other crap sitting around in my cloud storage.

The story is a sprawling, rambling, epic philosophical thriller with the working title of Lightbearers; the likes of which has only been seen once before in recorded history (and that took two people to do), and if we're lucky will never be seen again after this.

It's largest project I have ever attempted, and quite possibly the largest project I will ever attempt. At first, I tried to write it straight through beginning to end so that I could serialize it as I wrote it, something I rarely do, and quickly realized that it wasn't going to work (it never does for me). There is simply far too much to keep track of. For starters, aside from the primary plot thread, there are four other sub-plots that work their way through the entire story, and it's being told in anachronic order with frequently-shifting perspectives. Full of the sorts of things that I'm constantly advising other aspiring authors to avoid doing.

So, in order to make things more manageable, I split out the thread and am writing them linearly. Once the individual threads are assembled, then I'll start the work of assembling the story I really want to write. I set myself a goal of 150,000 words of notes before starting on the first real draft - 70,000 on the primary thread, and 20,000 on each sub-thread.

As of today, I have met or surpassed my goal for two of the sub-threads, and have nearly met my goal for a third. That one may not meet the goal, I'm not sure there's enough there to tell, but it's at least going to be 3/4ths of the way there, so I'm happy with that.

I'm a bit over 2/3rds of the way done on my primary thread, and am very happy with where everything is going. I need to up the action a bit, but that shouldn't be too difficult.

I'm barely over 1/4th of the way through the fourth sub-thread, and I'm not really happy with where that is going, so I'm planning a near-complete re-write. On the good side, this will be the easiest of the sub-threads to write, since it will not be tied quite as closely to the rest. Once I get going on it, I should be able to bash it it out in a month or so, time permitting.

Once I complete my notes, then I start work on the first draft proper. No clue how long that will take, but it should go fairly quickly by comparison, especially as I intend to use a cut-up technique to arrange the bones of the story into a rough shape first. The only tricky part at that point will be working in the narrator, and structuring the perspective shifts so that I'm not hopelessly confusing the reader. Or the writer, for that matter.

The end result will be somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 words. Rather than trying to dump a monolith like that on my readers (assuming I have more than one, or even one), I'm splitting it into a trilogy of three volumes, each consisting of two "books" of around 25,000 to 30,000 words each. More or less, it depends on where the story actually goes, and how it grows. It may end up being a lot longer or shorter than that. Whatever works best.

I'll definitely be tapping some of you ponies for editing assistance (no, I'm not paying for your therapy afterwards).

Oh, and there will be squirrels. Watch for the squirrels.