An Epic Tail!

Charles Dickens got paid by the word. Audio book readers get paid to read aloud by the word (go ahead , google it - I'll wait . . .). So, why doesn't the Library of Spanking Fiction award medals for authors who submit wordy documents? The LSF awards virtual medals for "100 submissions," for " 250 comments received," for" 250 favorites," for "25000 views" (if I ever get THIS medal, it will probably mean that I viewed my own stories about 24,900 times) and for winning any of the various story challenge competitions – but none for how many words an author has submitted. I mention this only because (shameless plug upcoming) I just submitted a story called "An Epic Tail of Ridiculous Proportions," which came in at 6800 words. (I was going to call it "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," but Dave Eggers, who apparently is somewhat of a famous author, had already stolen that title. Those who have read Mr. Eggers' book might find my own story a bit, uh, derivative). Though it's not the longest story I've ever written (again, where is my medal?), it is certainly the most unusual one, combining M/F, humor, F/M, humor, silliness, humor, and even a wee bit o'spanking (you'll get that joke if you read half way through the story). And if you do finish the story, my belief is that YOU deserve a medal too.

If you look on the Help page under Authors pages you will see there is a medal for number of words. Based on total number of words submitted, the first green medal is awarded at 250,000 words, the next one is at 500,000 words etc.

It does take a long time and a large number of stories to get to 250K but who's counting anyway.

And on the stats pages you can find that the Library has two stories of over 30,000 words each (with 5 more over 20,000 words, and another 105 over 10,000). Four authors have topped 1,000,000 words total in their contributions. Then using the search function, you can discover that both 30,000+ stories were submitted by Goodgulf, with both being over 36,000 words. Quite frankly, smeple, they make a mere 6,800-word effort appear rather trifling. Go try again.

Thanks canadianspankee. I did not know that. It kind of ruins the premise of my post, but the shameless plug remains!

However, I am now going to go and see what my total number of words are. Do words written in forum posts - like this one - count? Probably not . . .

Nope. Only words in stories/serials/poems/articles

Now wait just a minute, njrickmarlowe, you 236,688 word . . . wordsmith! (BTW, that number is pretty impressive). But 6800 words is trifling? Well, I never! Then again, maybe I have.

I was obviously oblivious (is that not some sort of an oxymoron?) to all these statistical things, never having known they even existed, until you and canadianspankee brought it to my attention. Now that I am looking at it, I see that there were only 264 stories in the 6,000-7,000 word range. There were at least 15,800 documents with LESS words, and less than 635 stories (even if mine was 264th in the 6000-7000 range, which is statistically unlikely). This puts me somewhere in the 75-80th percentile. So, my 6,800 word effort is not too shabby – as far as length goes anyway.

And since this is a shameless plug board, and not a statistical analysis class, I call your attention to two other stories I've written: "You Bet Your Ass," which is over 17,000 words, and A "Tail Of Growing Up, Volumes 1 and 2," which together equal over 20,000 words (with Volume 3 soon to come). My point is . . . well I don't really have a point, I initially was just trying to figure out a unique way to plug my "Epic Tail of Ridiculous Proportions Story." And now you've given me the opportunity to plug two other stories, so thank you!

I also call your attention to the possibility that my word counts are kept low (as opposed to other authors, like those who have, oh I don't know, let's say 236,688 words), because I am such a good editor of my own work. I say it is a possibility, though it is quite unlikely, because anyone who has read any of my work knows that I suck as my own editor, since I tend to add things rather than take them out. Like this post, for instance. It was initially going to be a two-sentence post, just to say "thanks" to you and canadianspankee for pointing out these numerical statistics to me. I wasn't going to even mention the correlation between spankos and statistics, like our standard deviation (of which all us spankos are guilty of - unlike say, excessive deviation), or statistical variables (F/M, M/F, FF/M, M/ff, m/f, f/m, WTF etc.) which pervade, if not pervert, the spanking library. I really wasn't going to mention them, and wouldn't have, if I was a good editor of my own work.

Oddly, I have no problem editing OTHER people's stories. I can easily whittle those down to a paragraph or two. Go figure.

Boy. for an editor you sure write a lot!

far too much for my own good. Instead of getting paid by the word, maybe I should get spanked by the word.

As an author with only one story that topped 6,800 words (indeed, only one that topped 4,500!), I find THOSE quite impressive.


As a retired master of the self-plug, I admire your jumping on the opportunity.


I manage to keep my stories short using a writer's version of ADD. If I can't finish a story in one sitting I lose focus. Therefore, I just get to a point and stop, no matter how much many of my readers think the tale should continue (or have - heaven forbid! - a sequel).

As for where those 236,688 words came from, it's sort of like your description of your intended two-sentence post - sometimes I just can't shut up.

In theory I could have a couple other long stories here. Arizona Vacation (22,373 words) is posted as a series but was written as a single story, as was Christmas Across The County Line (52,847 words - it might have set a record).

The thing, people get intimidated by long stories. That or the format of the library doesn't seem to lend itself to long stories. Breaking them into chunks (even arbitrarily picking places and saying "there - we end on that paragraph and start the next section on the next paragraph") makes them easier to read than one long story.

Every time I ask here "Post as one story or in parts" everyone chimes in for the "in parts" option.

But if we're going for record - there's one I'm working on now that will probably be longer than Christmas Across The County Line... I could post that as a single story....

Goodgulf