Yikes.

 So.  Last year I wrote four novellas that totaled about 130k words to tell the backstory of several characters and of the world of a project I'd been putting together for a few years before that, which I've tentatively named Carrying the Weight of the World.  As outlined, Carrying the Weight of the World soon became prohibitively huge.  It was going to be a massive, massive story, and would likely have to be split into multiple volumes.  So I thought, hey, why don't I cut these flashbacks I've been writing in the first half of the story, and write them out into more fleshed out stories of their own.  I had a lot of fun doing it.  I think they turned out pretty well, and they let me slim down my outline by a fair margin.  Of course, I had to completely throw out everything I'd written up to that point and start over to remove the flashbacks and incorporate more than a few story elements I'd added in fleshing these stories out, but that was fine.  All part of the process.  

So, anyway, I've been working on Carrying the Weight of the World, on and off, since then, and even with cutting a lot of content and shifting it to the novellas this story is getting pretty damn huge.  I'm on track to hit about 400k words before I'm done, which is absolutely enormous.  This is a story that just refuses to be told in a short 130k words like I want it to.  It's too complex, with too many plotlines and characters, and I may have to cut it up into multiple volumes anyway, even after I cut 130k words of content from it last year.

On the bright side, despite its enormous length, I am really liking how it's turning out.

So, anyway, that's what I've been doing this last year in writing.  I haven't spent the ENTIRE time sitting on my butt and playing videogames.