Okay, true to my word, when Wendy and Kaethel met the challenge I came out of active retirement. I've even posted a couple of stories since then as a show of good faith. But now we have to come up with the conditions whereas this tired old man can earn his retirement again.

I have sort of an idea...

How about once I've established myself as the second most prolific (no one can touch Wendy) writer in number of stories, I can earn my retirement. I'm talking about official (meaning Lois and Clark archived) stories. I'm also talking about the raw number of different stories not the word count. Labby's 'Masques' has put that idea all out of kilter.

So, here it is; Once I've reached the second most number of stories posted in the archives I am eligible to retire. What do you say? Sounds good , huh?

Tank (who is trying very hard to be fair about this)

No. :p

What, you were expecting a different reply?

LabRat

Tank, you're already second, with 38 solo stories and 19 T&W challenges. So this is a no way. The conditions are unfair and absolutely unacceptable.

Kaethel

Tank, Tank, Tank...

No point setting the bar so low that you've already passed it!

No chance we'll accept that, pal!

Love your suggestion, Wendy! Because it sort of kills two birds with one stone. It means more stories from Tank, and more stories from you. And I, as a reader, win! (greedy, me? naaah!)

You and Retirement Tank? The answers is quite simple: NO What else did you expect?

And yes, Wendy's suggestion is better. So both of you keep writing!

Saskia

Nope. I don't think I agree to those terms either!

I'm all for Wendy's suggestion. And Kaethel's logic is just fantastic!

Loriel (who is also being rather greedy!)

Good try, Tank ... seems the fan community caught onto your little attempt at misdirection pretty quickly, however.

This brings up a really interesting question, however ... just who are the most prolific writers in the fandom, based on number of stories in the Archive? Obviously Wendy is first, and we now know that Tank is second ... who else rounds out the top 10? I think this requires some investigation. And do the rankings change if we include number of nfic stories to the totals?

Inquiring minds want to know. <g>

Kathy

At one point, I was #3, but that was a while back Paul's been coming on strong, these last few years... then I guess we'd have to look at the ppl who churn out WAFFy vignettes Tracey, Kaethel, Erin, etc... but that would require some actual work, and right now Marissa wants to play a computer game

PJ

Tank

There's only one answer to this 'NO WAY'.

Tricia

The question that Kathy posed intrigued me, so I did a little research. I quickly scrolled through the author listings (on the archive only) and came up with the following counts, assuming an error of +/- 10% (is that enough to cover me?). I left nfic out of the mix.

Wendy: 68 solo + 24 joint = 92
Tank: 38 solo + 19 joint = 57
Nan: 35 solo + 1 joint = 36
Pam: 31 solo + 4 joint = 35
Paul: 29
Debby: 28 solo + 1 joint = 29
Zoomway: 26
Carol: 20
M.L.: 19 solo + 1 joint = 20
Kaethel: 15 solo + 4 joint = 19

I didn't include the "IRC Round Robin", which had 52 titles.

Of course these numbers will change constantly. Wendy has just finished 2 (or is it 3?) stories that will shortly increase her total when they're added to the archive. Tank, thankfully out of retirement, is happily adding to his as well. I agree with earlier suggestions - I think he needs to catch up with Wendy in order to re-retire...

KathyM

EDIT to respond to Paul rather than add a new message: Thanks Paul. I see that now, although why I didn't see the message last night I'm not sure. It must have been while I was counting... She also went into *much* more detail than I did, and fortunately her math is better than mine, which helped me correct an error

actually, kathy, kathyb counted up, too. she started a seperate thread for it here.

funny that both of you did the same thing at about the same time.

mentioned it on irc, and got the following comments:

<Shadow2> must be a kathy thing
<dgl_a> A fine kathygorization...

Paul