SH stories’ categories

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I forgot to mention that in case anyone wants to nominate any SH stories for Hugos, all the fiction we published last year was in the short story category (under 7500 words) except for Beth Bernobich's "Poison," which was a novelette. (David Moles's "The Memory of Water" was just under 7500 words by our count, but close enough to the boundary to be debatable. But Rich Horton called it a short story by his count as well.) For a list of all the stories we published in 2003, see our archive.

3 Responses to “SH stories’ categories”

  1. David Moles

    Yet Rich called “Theo’s Girl” a novelette, when, by word processor count, it’s actually several hundred words shorter than “The Memory of Water”. I [heart] word counts . . .

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  2. David Moles

    I take it back — Rich categorizes “Theo’s Girl” as a short story; it’s the Locus list that thinks it’s a novelette.

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  3. Rich Horton

    Ah, word counts. A subject near and dear to my heart! Ask me about the scandalous list of “novellas” nominated for the 2001 Retro-Hugos sometime! (Two were novels, too long to be listed as novellas, and two more were long novellas that could legally have been moved to the novel category.)

    I do word counts in two ways. For online publications, I just pop the story into an MS Word document, and let Word count the “words” (i.e. space delimited collections of letters). By that count, “The Memory of Water” is 7300 words. (I always round to the nearest 100 for short stories.)

    For paper publications, I estimate the number of words per page as follows: I count the number of letters and spaces in a few representative complete lines (not fragments). I divide by 6 to get an average “words per line”. I multiply by the number of lines per page to get words per page. Then for each story I estimate the number of pages, taking white space into account as rigorously as I feel like that day. [grin] The word count is obviously pages * words per page. (This by the way I learned from some old-timer, I think Fred Pohl, in a book or chapter of a book about editing for the old pulps.)

    Some books are harder to estimate than others, and Polyphony is particularly hard for some reason or other. (By which I mean, my words per line counts seem to very a great deal, making it hard for me to trust my averages.) But by my measure, “Theo’s Girl” was 7400 words.

    Be assured I told the folks at Locus that I thought it was a short story, as I did with a few stories I though miscategorized, but though they moved most of the stories I commented on, they didn’t move “Theo’s Girl”.

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