we're gonna need a bigger boat

[elz]

I'm working on chapter indexes right now for the AO3, and we got to talking about stories with lots of chapters, which got me looking at ff.net, where I discovered that there are 137 pages of Harry Potter fic of more than 100,000 words. That's a lot of words!

Ten minutes of searching has netted me an HP fic with 181 chapters (it was at 180 a few minutes earlier) and a LOTR fic with 781,467 words (which is the epilogue of a trilogy!).

Now I'm curious - what are the longest stories you've encountered in fandom? What are the longest stories you've actually read?

ETA: 1,036,782 words of Buffy/Faith over three and a half years, with an impressive average of 12,000 words per chapter - that's probably hard to beat. O.O

Comments

[rheanna]

I think the longest things I ever read were right back at the start of my time in fandom -- the Iolokus series by mustangsally78 and rivkat and Oklahoma by amperage and livengoo (both XF). I actually have no idea how long they both were, just that they're both easily novel length -- I'm pretty sure Iolokus is a couple of novels long.

I have to admit I rarely read very VERY long fanfic any more. If it's over 60k words, I'll probably only read it if it's been recced all over the place. There's a certain type of extra-long fanfic which just sort of goes on and on and on without the kind of pacing and structure that something that length has to have.

My favourite extra-long fics of recent years is shaenie's SGA fic Indelible. auburnnothenna writes excellent long SGA fic, too, including SGA fandom's War and Peace, The Water Grinds the Stone, which as I recall is somewhere north of 250k words, although my personal favourite of hers is In the City of the Seven Walls.

[elz]

Iolokus! I think those stories permanently warped my brain. *g* I didn't remember Oklahoma as being quite that long, but I went and checked, and wow, 170,000 words.

There's a certain type of extra-long fanfic which just sort of goes on and on and on without the kind of pacing and structure that something that length has to have.

Oh, definitely, yeah. I love long stories, but I know what you mean - it's especially frustrating when a story starts out really well and then loses all its oomph because the author doesn't know when to stop writing. More is unfortunately not always better.

*investigates SGA recs*

[rheanna]

Oklahoma is 170k words? Oh, wow -- I hadn't realised it was THAT long. I read it a long, long time ago, and back then I hadn't gotten used to reading on screen, so I used to print everything out. I remember Oklahoma took up an entire lever-arch file, all by itself. I wonder if either of the authors is still about in fandom; it'd be a shame if they'd both vanished completely.

[elz]

Using my best detective skills: amperage, gooligan

I'd be tempted to reread some of the older stories now, but there's a 110,000 word Star Trek fic to dive into first. *g*

[samvara]

Wowsers!

We're gonna need a really big boat

[sidra]

I'm pretty sure the longest fanfic I've ever read is Living (http://www.matthewtime.com/series.html) It has 19 parts, about 180 chapters and about 1.7 million words.