Originally Posted by Chiomara

I believe it was around 700 pages. I was only 21 or 22 when I wrote it; it was a sprawling, directionless, non-linear garbage heap that incorporated the stories of all of my favorite folk ballads and myths. (which included everything from Tam Lin to Inanna's descent into the underworld) So, it was purely indulgent.
It also frequently spiraled into almost entirely unrelated side-plots involving witch cults and murderous countesses and the like.

And lately I've been writing rough drafts for various interconnected short stories (children's' short stories, mainly) all set within the same universe. They're all a bit ridiculous; one is about an orphan girl named Frogmouth who lives in a ramshackle trash castle in a landfill. Her friends include a tiny imaginary luchadore, a raccoon, and a benevolent garbage man (who moonlights as an opera singer) who looks after her.

There's also one titled "Where Spiders Go" about a ghostly, almost grandfatherly sentient spider who lives within the walls of a 1940s boarding house and protects the sleeping children from various terrors both physical and spectral. (It's closely intertwined with another, similar story titled The Eyes in the Pines which follows a family of otherworldly white deer and runaway changeling children. And that one is very loosely connected to the one about dead Russian princesses-turned-demons who live at the bottom of an icy lake.)