Here’s how all of this gets written: I spend between an hour and ninety minutes hammering out some text, and maybe I proofread it, then I post it. Maybe I look at it again the next day and make a few changes — maybe I make a lot of changes — but maybe I don’t.

I’m confident that there are typos.

But I’m looking back at how much I’ve written so far. Rough word counts are as follows.

1. From the Beginning: 4,297

2. The Sunshine Factory: 5,179

3. True Names: 7,233

4. “Shall We Play A Game?”: 6,679

5. Confusion: 7,284

6. Dancing: 4,335

7. The Hacker Crackdown: 8,660

8. “Shall We Make A Game?”: 17,270

9. Making Magic: 33,837

Total: 94,774 words

That’s a lot of words. I bet I could cut a third or more out of the Hacker Crackdown without trying hard. I bet I could cut a thousand words out of True Names. But all of stories 1 through 6 combined are about the same size as “Making Magic”, which I don’t feel like I could cut too much. I’m shocked to look back and find it’s that long. I’m even more surprised to realize that I wrote all that in just under four weeks. Maybe I could cut a lot out of “‘Shall We Make A Game?'” but even still, the story’s not over yet and we’re already in the neighborhood of 100,000 words.

A small novel can be around 45,000 words. So this is already a medium-sized novel.

What I find most interesting is how something like a hundred people are all reading and enjoying this. I think there’s more, actually — somewhere just over 600 people visit at least occasionally — but some people’s visits are very far apart. Something like a hundred people get caught up every two to four days.

I’m grateful that anyone is reading it, much less so many people from all over the globe. Most people are from America, though maybe a third are in the UK, followed by Australia, Mexico, Canada, Brazil, France, Germany, Argentina, Spain, Peru, Hong Kong, Japan, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, over the last 30 days. That’s cool.

I’m going to see how long I can keep up with daily posting. I think we’re about two-thirds of the way to the end of this. I may just keep writing until I get there. I’ll try not to stretch it out.

Thanks for reading while I’m writing.