It’s taken us a while, but we’ve finally entered all the data for the story submissions we received for the upcoming second volume of Machine of Death! I wrote up a bit about it for the MOD blog:
The final few days of submissions felt, for us, in a weird way just like October 26 of last year. The flurry of activity we witnessed on Twitter, on Facebook, and on blogs as you finished writing your stories was incredibly energizing.
It’s a wonderful feeling watching people become enthused and finding reward in the thing that you asked them to do. It makes us not want to have to turn anybody down for Volume 2! But we received 6,373,643 words of submissions — if we published all of it, it would be longer than all the Harry Potter books and all the Lord of the Rings books and all the Song of Ice and Fire books and all of Stephen King’s Dark Tower books put together. You guessed it — we’re having a very busy couple of months, reading all of this!
For more details and all kinds of stats on the final count, as well as some neat new things we need your help with (do you know how to set up and run an academic survey? We’d very much like to pick your brain or enlist your assistance!), check out the full blog post.
Congrats to everyone who sent in a story, or three! We’re reading furiously, and I gotta say, it’s super fun. You devil, you made me have fun!
“if we published all of it, it would be longer than all the Harry Potter books and all the Lord of the Rings books and all the Song of Ice and Fire books and all of Stephen King’s Dark Tower books put together.”
But would it be longer than the Wheel of Time books?
DM: It would be approximately twice as long as the entire Wheel of Time series. And just the first seven books of that took me years to finish reading, so we’ll see how this goes!
You scale the mountain of slush and we’ll enjoy the choicest fiction morsels you pluck from the rare apple narrative pear shivering at the peak. Good luck with your climbing!