#PennedPossibilities 968 2/2 — What’s the current word count for your WIP?

Yikes! My answers to writer's hashtag challenges, such as Penned Possibilities consist of essays and stories, that will be content for an eventual author website. This content for me is definitely a work in progress. So, since @gahlearner (as best I recollect) sparked an idea of writing every reply as a Scrivener document before pasting them into Mastodon, I have a word count for all my replies stretching back to early 2023:

595,013 (not counting this reply).

Statistically speaking, this means I write 4 times as many words for Mastodon than I do for my stories.

I may need to rethink my focus…

EDIT: The word count includes approximately 50 words of question text and hashtags. So with 2,929 replies, that's 146,450 words that I did not write. Subtracted from 595,013, the actual word count is 448,563 words. Still 3.5 times the words going into my story WIPs since early 2023.

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#PennedPossibilities 968 — What’s the current word count for your WIP?

I should look more often. It's way larger than the minimum for a novel at 93,338 words. In a way, Reluctant Courier (for the Mob) is a bit of an R-rated soap opera, and entertaining things happen along the way. There's probably 20,000 words of essential stuff still not written, however. Here's a screenshot of Scrivener's assessment with TL;DR statistics for your enjoyment, with #AltText! For those interested in chapter length, all my chapters are one document in length.

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[Blue volunteered to answer this one. He is a male praetorian friend and lover of Bolt's, who's both the MC and a woman. They're both day angels... —RS]

Because I live at an association, I am around a lot of women. What is in vogue, what scents the air, are aromatic herbal scents. In our hot and sweaty world, everyone smells to the point that you don't notice it—until you receive a swift kick in the nose with an herbal "Hello, handsome!" I don't appreciate this squeal in the background noise. Truthfully, though I've recently learned that Bolt has a preference for her men wearing thyme oil, she's neither fashionable nor trendy herself. She prefers to be her natural self, whatever her state, with little fix-up, which means she'll pop in looking however she looks, even with a cowlick or two, or feathers akimbo. To me, this comes off a genuine, compared to the other women. I know she has her secrets she is loathe to share, yet it still feels genuine—genuinely, distinctively, my friend Bolt. I admire her athleticism; she taught me plenty of tricks I needed for work. Her constant sweaty motion leaves with her emitting a unique aroma. Though I wouldn't say to her directly, because she might take it wrong, I find her scent reassuring and very attractive. It's my favorite.

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#ScribesAndMakers 2026.03.26 —Do you dance or move along to music when you listen?

These days, it seems like I only listen to music while I'm in the car, where I have a super premium sound system. When driving, stopped at a stop light, you might witness me playing piano on the steering wheel or dancing in my seat. So, yes. I wonder what the driver looking in their mirror ahead or the one behind think, especially when they realize I'm five decades past being a teenager.

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#PennedPossibilities 976.1 — #imposterToot: Pick a character. How do they, or how would they, react to sleep deprivation?

@floofpaldi : Get some rest. Feel better. —RS

I'll pick the devil-girl. She's #autistic like her author, and seemingly OP thanks to her training and study and logical-literal take on the world, which grants her plenty of ability through raw unfettered stubbornness, but she's got lots of defects, emotional and psychological. Physical too, but that's because she refuses to take into account her body's limits, and has the scars to prove it. People say she has a death wish.

May be true.

She reacts to sleep deprivation by powering through, regardless. Her trained-into-her sense of responsibility causes her to have the back of anybody she's responsible for, or anyone hurt, or, if innocent, threatened. She makes herself sick fighting exhaustion. Logic requires mental energy and exhaustion obliterates it. This inevitably leads to mistakes. In this she demonstrates that despite her apparent maturity, she's still a teenager.

The good thing is that she's taught herself the soldier's trick of falling asleep instantly. Once it's over, boom, out.

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#ScribesAndMakers 2026.03.25 —Do you use music as a storytelling tool? Give an example.

If music is another character in the story, naturally. When I wrote a series of stories about a DJ who after a traumatic meeting with an evil god (who is quickly defeated by others) becomes a part time hero with suicidal tendencies (she thinks she's the god's knight), the music is integral. Over the novelettes in the series, she goes from breaking into the business, to making a name for herself and a living, to becoming a star recognized by royalty, to a producer songwriter famous throughout the country. She ends up saving hundreds fairly anonymously along the way. However, at an epic rave, when she encounters a guy she went to school with whom she's still attracted to working the lighting, she uses her music to seduce him, singing as she approaches him, clearing a path through the audience, to dance with him to the beat. The song is a duet; he acknowledges her by singing the male part. They end with a very public kiss. The scene would melt your heart.

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#WordWeavers 2026.03.25 —What do you feel thinking about the last scene you wrote?

Pretty good. I've extended the mystery of the devil-girl and turned Bolt, the day angel MC, into a hot mess of conflicting emotions, exposing her vulnerabilities to having someone she likes want to make her happy because they want to. (There's some NSFW stuff immediately before and innuendo here.) The subsequent scene I set up is going to leave Bolt confused and not trusting her own desires. Not too shabby!

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2026.03.26 —How much of a break or hiatus do you take between works?

I work on more than one story at a time. They overlap.

Writing is Life.

Taking a break or hiatus would be tantamount to suffocating myself.

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#PennedPossibilities 967 — What level of education do your characters have?

Day angel Bolt barely started her senior year in high school when she fled from the law.

Pigeon the Pilferer on the other wing actually graduated, though mostly it was thanks to the school nurse he had a crush on mending the punk-in-training.

Blue graduated, but now as a praetorian he is getting officer training. Bolt taught him to fly tandem.

Shugh completed college to become a journalist, rare for men who go into trades in the short term and then childcare, the societal norm. He gets lots of sexist pushback from coworkers.

Molt was in his first year of Men's Studies at university.

The devil-girl finished fourth grade when her guardian connived to have her tutored instead, causing her to be schooled or physically trained every waking hour—until she ran away. Since then, she's self-taught, often found studying, working out, sometimes shadowboxing.

Rainy Days wrote many of the books, and certainly the history books, thought at the time of her youth women were preferred illiterate. She taught herself to read with her autistic brother's help, and he taught her miracle work with which she conquered the world. She's technologically immortal, but her memories often fade so she's always learning anew.

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#WritersCoffeeClub #WCC 2026.03.24 —Do you have a writerly "third place"?

One of the things I like about these prompts is learning about something I didn't know. I don't really have a place per se that I write other than home, and I am retired so I don't write at the office—though I did write while taking long walks during my lunch break (true, thumb-typing on my phone). I do occasional write at a park or a coffee place, but never consistently. I do often write on longer trips in the car. With the spouse driving! I don't think this latter constitutes what this question asks.

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