The Spoons That Are My Ears!

I've done it. At last. 500 stories. It has taken twenty years to get this far; and now I'm exactly halfway through my intended life's work. A list of all five hundred can be found here. These are all my surviving stories -- I wrote many before 1989 but those have been lost. So I count 'Raindancing' as my first story. Since then I have written 1,982,247 words of fiction, which means that the average length of a Rhys Hughes story is 3,965 words. But I doubt I have even a single story precisely that length.

Of course that wordage doesn't include the words in all the partly completed tales that haven't yet been added to the list. In fact, checking my list of stories-not-yet-finished I see that there are 180 of those; and some of them are fairly well advanced. But essentially I want my second set of 500 stories to be different from the first set. I might have to write a manifesto of some kind to give me direction. There are certain things I want to change about my writing. I need to learn how to develop in certain areas where I'm lacking. My characterisation is pretty poor. That's one area where I can make improvements. There are many others...

And yet, I truly believe that I've done something remarkable for a Welsh writer. Without meaning to tarnish my own trumpet by blowing it too hard, I can't honestly think of any other Welsh writer who has engaged himself on a project of such complexity, intricacy and grandiosity (I don't regard 'grandiose' as a dirty word). One thousand stories linked into a single gigantic organism, each story separate from the others and yet forming a vital component of the whole... I decided to celebrate reaching the halfway stage of this project with another painting. I still can't paint. But here it is anyway. It's bigger than this, but it wouldn't all fit on the scanner. Surfing dinosaurs are like that.