I’ve been working on a novella lately and this past week I found myself fully immersed in it. I found the groove, so to speak, and have been barreling ahead with considerable glee. It’s the thing about writing I most love and the thing that hasn’t been there for several months, not since I finished my historical and mailed it off in May. Even before that it was sporadic.
But I’ve slipped into the stream on this one and I owe it to a couple of perceptive editorial remarks from the people to whom I’d like to sell it. That part I haven’t had for years now. The last time I receive decent editorial feedback was from the folks at BenBella, who published Remains. They did a thorough and remarkable job editing that book and made it better than my original.
I haven’t placed much of anything in the last few years. My numbers really suck for most of my novels and because of the tracking system now in place everyone knows it. I’m thinking that one of these months I will pass into the oblivion of being deleted from the system, so I might get a fresh start. But I am running out of patience for that.
One of the things I’ve had enormous difficulty with since about 2004 is short fiction. Just haven’t been able to finish a short story. My hope with this novella is that the block will break and I can start doing short stories again.
I tend to think in Big Ideas, and generally a short story doesn’t have the carrying capacity for them, so they kind of wallow and sink before I can bring them into dock. This novella does has a Big Idea, but at 25,000 words it had the size to carry it. I hope so, anyway. I have half a dozen short stories at least in various stages of completion and I would like to have the mental space to finish them and get them out.
But for the moment, I’m having fun with a new story. Stayed tuned.