I've been on the internet a while. I've seen a lot of projects of basically every stripe- prose fictions, webcomics, videos, review blogs, etc etc etc. I understand when, for example, an artist gets better at drawing in the course of making something and the old stuff looks worse than the new stuff. that makes sense! it's part of the journey, and I don't really care for "redraws" and etc. what really bugs me is when something just ends early.
like, I get it. it's rough out there, it's been getting increasingly rough out there for far longer than our lifetimes, and people do this shit for free. still, it's a certain kind of deflating when something just gets cut off before it was done- the creator moved on, or got too busy, or changed their mind, or whatever. I understand it, but I still don't like when it happens.
so when some kind of bug crawled into my brain and bit me in the right spot on the lobe to make me actually start a creative project for once in my life, I decided I'm not going to do that. I've posted before about a mass effect project I've been working on, which has become essentially a prose remake that keeps the broad strokes but makes the details my kind of sicko shit. okay, big fanfic. I told myself I wouldn't start editing and publishing until the whole thing was done, so even if I faltered, I could publish the rest of the first draft and call it good. so that some manner of conclusion existed.
the mass effect 1 segment is a clean 101 pages. that's default google docs 11 point arial font pages. part of having the early parts unpublished when I do the later parts means I've recognized a bunch of stuff I want to go back in and add to support new ideas I had, so let's say that should be more like 130, 150 pages.
the mass effect 2 segment is 238 pages. hey, something I realized: that game has too many fucking characters.
the mass effect 3 section, which contains far more Rewrite than the rest by volume since in hindsight I really don't like any of mass effect 3's story beyond the elevator pitch, is about 159 pages and is currently... a third? done. yeah, that sounds about right.
all of these numbers are likely to bloat further in editing, because my first draft is extremely barebones stuff. I may have gone too big on essentially my first creative writing project since 2000s forum days. I do like that I haven't started publishing, because that means the early stuff isn't locked in and I can edit it to fit better ideas I've had since I started. I also understand why nobody does it this way because it's insane