whilewaitingtobepublished.com

I wrote a 106 page novella this week.  At the start of this week it did not exist.  Monday it was a 6-page short story titled “Story 37”, one I revised and sent out to a publisher by Friday.  I intended to write “Story 38” and perhaps “Story 39” the same week:  I already knew what they were going to be.  (In the sense that their two narrators were standing beside me with things they urgently wanted to say.)

So how does it feel to write 106 pages (33,144 words, half the length of a short novel) in a week?  Dazing, exhilarating, surprising.  I spent most of the week in the narrator’s world rather than my own, I put off obligations, sent people away with a curt phone conversation or a vague wave, I worried about her worries and went to sleep every night hoping I would have time to write the next day – and that I would get anything to write the next day.  Each day I would stop and have no idea what came next:  if I had no time to write for a few days then the narrator would leave, the plot and setting would evaporate, and I would be no better at finishing the story than a reader would be at guessing the ending of a few chapters torn out of an unfamiliar book.

When this novella arrived I:

Worse, the work I have just given a week of my life to (longer if I want it to be anything but a first draft) may never see anything but the top of my desk drawer.  Most markets won’t look at anything longer than 5,000 words* (or 20,000 at the ones that take long short stories).  “Story 37: The Novella” can’t be cut that much nor could it be padded 2 ½ times to make an acceptable novel manuscript for a top of the line publisher.  (Unless the narrator spends several pages of each chapter thinking about her early childhood, wondering what color to paint the living room, what life would have been like if she had married that Balmer guy she knew before enlisting, lying in a field describing a single blade of grass, or taking apart the nose assembly of her space ship to see exactly what is inside it.)  In other words it may be a complete waste of time:  from the point of view of writing-for-anyone-but-me I might have been better off this week writing and sending out “Story 37”, “Story 38” and “Story 39”.  However, I have faith that someone, somewhere will want to publish this (and the 16 other novellas I have written) so I keep at it.

*  5,000 words is about 21 manuscript pages formatted according to William Shunn’s guidelines, which are more-or-less the standard for Science Fiction magazines.

Read "No Woman, No Plaything" in Kaleidotrope