**Wall of Text Warning**
Well, I suppose I'm an author in progress.
A little more than a year ago, I was wandering through the Space Battles forum and saw a discussion about Endbringers vs. Mab, and I was curious. So I looked up this online blogfiction called "Worm" by a fellow named Wildbow. A million or so words later (literally), after I got caught up with the story, I started watching it for the twice a week updates. I started participating in the fanbase discussions in the comments.
Seeing what Wildbow was doing, serial fiction, a couple times a week, made me realize that it looked like an ideal way for ME to practice writing. I could get feedback from people on a daily basis. I could watch page stats and see what people seemed to like. It had been around 25 years since my last English class though, so I knew I would be terribly rusty. At the same time, I had been told by lots of people in the long distant past that I was pretty good at writing interesting short fiction. So I wrote my first serial fiction. A fanfiction based in Wildbow's world of Worm, but with my own original characters. Even now, it's pretty terrible grammatically. I stopped updating it and making fixes after I started doing my own original writing. On days when I think that my writing just sucks though, I can look at this link and realize what around 700k words written have done for me.
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9523770/1/ArcSo after I finished Arc, I started my own original science fiction, one chapter at a time in a blog, like Wildbow. I had already blown off a bunch of rust from my writing skills with Arc, but had no clue how much more improvement I could expect from myself. I wrote somewhere around 500,000 words in Symbiote, over four "books" in a few months time. I learned so much. I also learned that I had a whole lot more to learn. A bunch of people started following me, offering me feedback and pointing out my grammar errors, I also got some commentary about the actual meat of the writing. It was all tremendously valuable. Wordpress allows you to look at old revisions of pages, and I can tell you that the first few pages of Symbiote, as originally written, were terrible, horrible, awful. More terrible to me now than the first chapter of Arc felt when I started working on Symbiote, which can be found here.
https://farmerbob1.wordpress.com/about/Eventually though, I felt like I needed to move to a new project. I had isolated some of my own writing faults and wanted a new universe to write in to try to isolate and address those faults. I also wanted to write superpowered fiction. So I started writing another original work, Reject Hero. Reject hero is only one book, but it's a fairly lengthy one, at somewhere around 200k+ words. Again, it is a chapter-based web blog.
http://rejecthero.wordpress.com/about/Again, I learned a lot. When I read some of what I think to be the best-written chapters in Reject Hero, I know full well that I've bought books that were written by less talented writers. Not that I'm claiming to be GOOD, mind you, but I'm claiming to be better than at least some people who have managed to get themselves published.
One of the great things about blog fiction is that you get immediate feedback, after you have a established base. I cannot stress enough how much that made a difference to me. I have thick skin though. Some people won't be able to deal with it, especially for their own original fiction. Having some random person offer random criticism can hurt. A couple people have done so with big enough pointy sticks to hurt me, and I'm the guy that writes a chapter, and then drops the first draft onto the internet for followers to read. Literally. I typically at least do a quick read-through, but what hits the blog for my readers first is a first draft. I have discovered that it helps me be a little more careful about what and how I write. (I do continue to update and correct when problems are brought to my attention. The first post is sometimes significantly different than the final version, after I've poked at it a few times.)
My biggest weakness, however, is that I am a 'gardener' style writer. However I have started to think that this might only be the case because I've been too lazy to actually write a framework for a book, and then fill in the chapters with *shudder* a pre-arranged sequence of events. So my next two projects are going to involve me trying out this whole "planning" thing before I write, rather than putting butt-in-chair and letting the characters do what they want.
I realize that this whole planning thing is work, so I'm going to start with a small project. I am now writing a fanfic where I plan to combine characters from two of my favorite original fiction writers. Jim Butcher, and Wildbow. I will be introducing Knight of the Cross Butters and his companion Bob to the Thorburn Bogeyman Blake and his companion Evan. The short story crossover is called Knights of Broken Swords, and it can be found here:
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10888845/1/Knights-of-Broken-Swords (When I realized that two of my favorite authors each has characters who wielded broken swords, I simply could not resist using the two of them together in a fanfic.) Only chapter 1 has been written at this point, but there will probably be a couple chapters a week for a few weeks until I finish the story.
And then I will be starting my third original work, in something that I had someone call a 'stonepunk' world. I'm going to be trying several new things beyond simple planning in advance. First, there will be no super powers or hyper-technology. Everyone will be normal humans. Second, I'm going to attempt to write it as rational fiction, as described over at /r/rational at Reddit. Thirdly, I'm going to try to write it as a YA or light novel genre book, which will challenge me to keep my word count down, while keeping my information density high, and the action has to happen regularly.
I've heard people say that the first million words are practice. I'm nearly done practicing
