Writing

I mentioned a few weeks ago that during my Thanksgiving trip to Chicago, I finally made some progress on the story I started back in February or so.

Made some more progress this past Monday, during a writing afternoon with Mary Anne and Thida and Alex in Los Gatos; another 2000 words. Then another thousand words on Wednesday, sitting with Mary Anne in a café. (Before I interrupted myself by knocking over Mary Anne's chai all over my coat and her bag and the floor.)

So I'm really pleased to be making progress on this thing. It's still not flowing as smoothly as I would like, but I'm trying to just get a draft done for now; then I'll go back and polish in rewrites.

The unfortunate thing is that, when I reached the 5000-word mark on Monday, I realized that I was only about a quarter of the way through the plot. Which means it'll likely clock in around 20k words, about twice as long as the longest thing I've previously ever written.

Which means it's a novella. And novellas are notoriously hard to sell.

I could probably flesh it out some--there's a bunch of material that I'm leaving out in an attempt to streamline the plot, so I could put it back in and thus slow down the pace. And I could decide to not stop at my planned ending, and instead add in the extra post-ending material I've been considering. But even if I did all that, it would probably not end up being more than about 35k words--so still a novella, and a longer one. I can imagine expanding it further into a novel, but it'd likely be a very short novel, and I suspect that at the moment those may be even harder to sell than novellas.

It's also possible I could trim it down to novelette length. There's probably material at the beginning that doesn't really need to be there, and if I don't want the pacing to be slow, cutting that stuff out may be a good idea.

Anyway, I'm not gonna worry about it for now. Just gonna try and get a draft done, and figure out at that point what to do with it.

Mostly the point of this entry is just to say that I'm finally writing again, thanks to Mary Anne, and I'm liking it. Hope I can keep going after she goes home.

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