Thursday, February 17, 2011

Progress on A GNOME PROBLEM (a novelette)

Well, even though I've been slacking with my blog, I haven't been slacking with my writing.  I went over a short story that I had written last year called, "A Gnome Problem."  Re-reading it, I forgot how much fun I had writing it.  It was even more fun to read it.  By the time I finished it, I decided that it was time to go back and do a re-write.

I also realized that this was one of my longest short stories.  If you've read any of my stories from IN DECLINE, you'll notice that for the most part, I keep my stories pretty short.  I don't do that on purpose.  I just make a story as long as it has to be in order to tell the story.  This one, however, was quite long.  Over 6K in words.

That's when I realized that maybe I can turn this into a novelette.

A novelette, from what I've read, begins at 7,500 words and the max limit is somewhere around 14,000 (as that would be a novella).

On the rewrite, I'm not even close to finish, and I'm already over 5,100 words.  I'm pretty sure I can reach 7,500 without any problems.

Why am I doing this?  Well, I think it'd be neat to have something other than a short story.  Short stories are fine and well, but maybe if this ends up being a novelette, more people might give it a try.  Plus, the story is an odd one.  I don't think I could ever include it in an actual short story collection, unless I came up with several other stories with the same theme.

So, I've been making a lot of progress on A GNOME PROBLEM.  This time I might use some beta readers to get a feel of how people will react to it.  It's an odd, odd tale.

Lots of cursing, too.  Hope that won't bother people.  Well... I'm sure it will, but nothing I can do about that.  My characters have potty-mouths at times, and I'll be damned if I'm going to censor them!

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