Length Matters

I need your help!
Sorry for the tease (it IS a sexy image don'tchathink!?), but this isn't a cap or an obscura or even a sexy story.  BUT I do need your help to define a difference in my writing as I want to be clear with what I'm putting out.  You see, I've fallen into a trap where I believe several of my obscuras are long enough to be put out as stories all on their own.  But how long does a story have to be to warrant being published without images?  How long until it's worth putting up on fictionmnia?  If you've followed me long enough, you know I've tried to venture into long form writing for awhile now, and this is a step that will help me.

So what I'm talking about is story length.  I look at length in two ways.  Word count is the easiest way to count, but almost all of my TG reading comes from fictionmania and there I look at the story as a file length when saved as a text file.  For instance, one of my recent favorite stories is "The Perfect Match" by RH Music and it was near the perfect length for me.  It had an introduction, a story arc, several short 'asides' that worked as character development, and a good finale that wrapped everything up.  Longer stories than this need to be broken up into chapters.  Shorter stories... well that's what we're here to talk about.

I know on fictionmania, I don't really love very short stories.  You see, "The Perfect Match" is listed as 148.7 K.  25 K is about as small as I'll go unless the story is recommended by someone directly or its by an author that I adore.  To put that into a word count scale, "The Perfect Match" has 27,286 words (including it's title, the author's name, a short synopsis, and "The End".  I read somewhere that if you take your word count and divide it by 390, you'll get your rough page count if published in a standard book format.  That would put "The Perfect Match" at 69 pages (heh... 69).  I wouldn't even pick up a book at the store that was only 69 pages as that's FAR to short to be a book.  But, here we are... what are the differences.

Now caps are almost impossible to define by word count, text size, or book length.  With my style they fit into the number of images you have.  Obscuras should feel like a cap so they should be short and sweet.  An easy read.  But whats the difference between an Obscurra and a short story?  Whats the difference between a short story and a story?  Whats the difference between a story and a book?

I'm getting into this for both a historical context and for projects moving forward.  You see, I'm working on a story that feels like it could be very long.  300 K to 500 K when done.  I'm currently at the 90 K mark and it's not anywhere near half finished.  Then yesterday I went to write out a cap that turned out to long and changed to an obscura that.... well I haven't edited it yet, but it's 100 K.  Over 17,000 words.

So, let's look back at some history of mine as I've been known to be wordy before.  Let's see where these stack up.

Early in my capping I had trouble with fitting all the words I needed on a single panel.  This was different than seeing six images that I wanted to use and stretching the story out to fit those panels.  My first multi panel cap was "Always Read The Fine Print" but that was about there being a lot of images I wanted to use and not the story being too long.  My first cap that was too much story for the image I had was "He Didn't Know...".  Look at that cap and tell me I didn't need to trim that story WAY down.  It looks ridiculous.  But, it's still only 1,119 words.  5.9 K.  A little under 3 pages in a book.

The first cap I looked at as a "very long" story was "Girly Girl".  It came out soon after "He Didn't Know..."  It ended up being 7 panels and the first three of those had only vague images that didn't really belong to the story.  I liked the story portion, but hated the cap execution.  That being said, it was 4,859 words.  26.1 K.  12.4 pages.

I know I wrote some longer caps, but I started dividing them up between more images which made it work far better.  My next step was "Getting Clean" a couple years later.  I wrote a far to long story for the single image I had.  Instead of pushing it all in though, I pared it WAY down to make a cap and included what I then called the 'short story' version in the post.  That 'short story' was 1,503 words.  7.7 K.  3.9 pages.

A year after that, I started my other blog.  At the time I called it Caitlyn's Musings as it was where I would mull over writing a story.  There was the suggestion that I use my cap "Language Barrier" as the impetus of a longer story and I worked on it for several months.  But "worked on it" doesn't mean writing... I wrote part of an outline, worked on characters and their histories and did everything EXCEPT write the story out.  Eventually I gave up that idea and later turned Caitlyn's Musings into Calvin's Musings and it's where I write about my life (a kind of journal or diary).

The next step along my writing path was "Happiness Found".  Like "Getting Clean" I wrote a longer story for a cap that wouldn't work in that format.  Instead of stuffing it in or finding multiple panels images, I pared it down to a cap form and then let the longer 'Short Story' form be published on the Caitlyn's Musings blog (this was before changing it over to Calvin's Musings).  But again, for a long cap, this was still a very short story.  3,058 words.  15.7 K.  About 8 pages.

A few months after "Happiness Found" I wrote "My Roll In Their Threesome" (by the way, that's a typo that I just saw six and a half years later... it should be 'My ROLE In their Threesome'!  DOH!). Anyway, I shared it with Simone and she liked it enough to suggest I post it to Fictionmania.  To a cap artist to me, especially back in 2013, that was mighty high praise to hear.  Authors posted their works on Fictionmania, not little cap artists like me.  I was destined to work in photoshop, where authors just played in your mind's eye. So... I promptly formatted into pure text and published my first story at Fictionmnia.  The odd thing is that this is the shortest of my 'long' caps.  I didn't even have to pare it down to fit into the cap format... I just made the text a little smaller than normal.  It ended up at 1,348 words.  7.2 K.   3.5 pages.

Feeling good about myself, I went back and and posted "Happiness Found" to fictionmania as well, but before I started scouring my works and maybe publishing "Girly Girl", and "Getting Clean" I took a longer look at the story length.  And then I looked at other stories of that general length.  And then it hit me... these were exactly the types of stories that I avoided on fictionmania.  They just weren't long enough.  They were fine for a cap, but they felt cut off.  They barely had an introduction, had very little story arc, almost no real character development, and the finale was almost always a quickie sex scene.

Not wanting to build up a new audience that just looked at me as a bad writer, I left Fictionmania.  Those stories are still there, but I haven't added anything older or newer.

Jump ahead by three years and we come upon "Manipulative Step-mother".  An obscura that got away from me and ended up as 3,086 words.  15.9 K.  A touch under 8 pages.

Later that year I wrote "Role Model".  This was another obscura that got away from me as I just kept writing and writing and writing.  I'll freely admit that I ADORE this story.  It's not just the image, although it really sets the tone, it's the good guy helping a friend.  It's the small steps lead to almost full transition.  It's the hints at sex then full on forced sex.  It's the loving attitude.  I just felt it was too long for the obscura format.  But looking back now... well its only 3,169 words.  16.5 K.  A touch over 8 pages.

"Kneel" came up next about a year later.  3,381 words.  17.3 K.  8.7 pages.

For awhile I thought those three were my new normal 'long' short story.  Around 3000 words.  Every dozen or so obscuras would turn into one of these and it would be fun to indulge.  Then indulging got a new view with "Taking Care Of My Guys".  This was very late 2017, so a little over 2 years ago now.  "Taking Care Of My Guys" ended up at 9,094 words.  46.7 K.  23.3 pages.

That was the length of a story I'd read on Fictionmania.  Now at this point I'd been writing TG fiction for seven years.  My "Long" stories were all 1/3 this size and this was the only story that I thought might be worthy of the Fictionmania treatment.  And after posting the other drabbles in comparison to this, I decided to not post it there.  I'd let my profile continue to gather dust and just try and forget being an author.

Just a few months later, however, I posted "Shared Too Much".  This was an unusual story/obscura as it was a recanting of a story that came to me while I was exploring New Orleans.  It was told from my perspective with just a few of those "What if I actually bought that mask" or "what if I had panties on when my pants got pulled down" situations turning from fiction in my mind to fiction on the page.  While it was unique in it's origin, it still clocked in at 6,518 words.  33.8 K.  16.7 pages.  This is that in between size... depending on the synopsis and the rating, I'd probably read it.  But if I was in the mood for something more character driven or explicit, I may skip by it.

My very next posting was "Dirty Work" at 3,063 words.  16.1 K.  7.9 pages.

A few months later I wrote "Weekend Wife" that came in at 4,479 words.  23.5 K.  11.5 pages.

The very next post was "Id" that was 4,754 words.  24.6 K.  12.2 pages.

My next post was "Temp" that came in at 5,984 words.  30.8 K.  12.8 pages.

Two posts later I wrote "Submit" that was 6,560 words long.  34.6 K.  16.8 pages.

Two posts later I posted "Maid To Be His Woman"  I allowed myself three days to write this one as I really liked where the story was going and didn't want to rush it.  That extra work made it my longest work, surpassing "Taking Care Of My Guys" by over 2,500 words.  The end tally was 11,615 words.  60.5 K.    Almost 30 pages.

My next post was "Coming Home" with 6,138 words.  31.8 K.  15.7 pages.

I posted "Taking Care Of My Guys" on December 18, 2017.  I posted "Coming Home" on January 19, 2019.  So in 7 years of writing TG fiction I had never exceeded 3,500 words.  In the next thirteen months I wrote 9 stories that averaged almost 6,500 words.  It seems almost unfortunate that at that point I started to get back more into Caps.  When I did pepper some obscuras in, they were the standard short ones, barely getting to 1,000 words.

It wasn't until September of 2019 that I returned to long(er) form writing and wrote "Crashing Down" that had 5,788 words.  30.7 K.  14.8 pages.

A few months later, in late December 2019 I started working on my next project.  This one started out as an obscura, but I let it run and run and run.  When I saw that it would be another one of those long form ones, I stopped writing, pulled back, and read it over while considering the whole story idea I had begun with.  I decided to abandon the whole obscura idea and start to run with making it a VERY long form story.  I didn't really ever do a word count like this before, but my longest to date is "Maid To Be His Woman" at 11.5 thousand words and I figured I'd be at least doubling that.  When I started writing with that in mind, without letting myself skip all the fun details, I realized I could easily eclipse any story I'd written before by 4 or 5 times.  I've worked on and off with this story since then but I think about it often.  If all the quick fun ideas end up in it with as much detail as I'd like, I might still be looking at this with too small of a lens.  I might have a 500 K story on my hands.

Now, that's ambitious and I don't want to scare myself away.  I'm just going to keep writing and let my reader let me know how I'm doing.  Yes, I have a specific reader who is going through this as I add pieces and letting me know how it works.  She's even catching my typos!  I don't have a title for this story yet, as I'm not quite sure how the story will turn out.  It involves two people getting transformed and matched up at a club/resort/clinic.  So, if I talk about the 'matched up' story or the 'club' or 'resort' or 'clinic' story, that's this one.  Right now, taking all of my notes out and the entire section that I wrote, but will re-write later, the story is over 90 K.  And again, it's nowhere near the halfway mark.  Hell, the transformation has barely begun!

And then came yesterday.  I saw an image and fell in love.  I had already written an obscura (Bottom Ballerina Bitch) and made a cap (A Study In Contrasts), so I didn't exactly start writing this one early in the day.  But it became clear pretty quickly that this could go on and on and on.  So, knowing how much I was getting into longer pieces, I just let it all flow out of me.  I wrote around my laundry.  I wrote around lunch and dinner.  I wrote around everything.  My normal bedtime on a quiet weekend at home is between midnight and 2 AM.  My head hit my pillow at thirty after five AM.

And while I still have to read what I wrote, edit it, and maybe add a little more buzz and pizzazz to the ending, it currently stands at 19,973 words.  105 K.  51.2 pages.  It's even longer than the story I've been writing and re-writing for 6 weeks.  And with all those glorious, scene setting,descriptive, world building words... I have a single image to use.  I'm not sure what to do with this.  I'm not sure my blog makes the best reading platform.

So... back to the original question.  How do I classify my creations.

• Caps are easy as there is no limit to their length.  They are what they are.  
• Short obscuras, say between a dozen and 1,500 words, are easy to classify as obscuras.  
• Obscuras that are between 1,500 and  3,000 words, especially those with just one image are... what?
• Obscuras between 3,000 and 12,000 words.... my current collection of 14 that qualify in this area... are these more short stories?  Should they be published at Fictionmania to get a more story driven audience?  
• And these last two long ones... should they even be published here at all?  

I'm thinking that once it crosses that 3,000 word mark it's a short story.  Say, up to 7,000 words.  Above 7,000 are the shorter side of regular stories.  And 9,000 or more qualifies as a story and really probably shouldn't be posted here at all. Of course if I ever put my work up at Fictionmania and not here, I'll still post a notice here.  Kind of like when I call attention to posts on my other blog.  I'll include all the behind the scenes, ideas, and frustrations with writing while Fictionmania will have just the story.  

So, what do you think?  Do you think those numbers and classifications work?  Does it help you at all to have them classified at all?  Let me know so that I can decide at the very least what to do with this next much longer story and my opus when it's finished.