Six Skills and novelettes
Jan. 8th, 2011 10:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mrissaScott Andrews, the editor over at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, suggested that it would be good for me to provide a link to the novelette of mine they published last year, The Six Skills of Madame Lumiere, and to note its eligibility for awards. He's been saying nice things about it, which I greatly appreciate especially considering the source. (I like BCS! Go! Read!) So here's your link: free story, whether you care about awards or not, and if you don't want to read more about novelettes and haven't read it yet, go on ahead and enjoy.
Meanwhile, it reminded me that I've noticed a shift in my writing. I've always written at a variety of lengths, down to short-shorts and up to novels, but I have had a deliberate bias against the longer short forms up until fairly recently. They can be a right pain to sell, is the long and short of it, so when I got promising ideas that felt like they were going to be longer than the magical novelette line, I have been likely to put them aside half-finished and focus on something in the two to five thousand word range for which there are a kajillion markets.
I'm trying to stop that, because I really like some of my novelette ideas. They keep accreting text because I poke at them a bit at a time--I don't seem to want to give up on them, even as I say to myself, "Ugh, nobody wants anything longer than five thousand words." This is flatly untrue, and I know it's untrue--my first sale to Analog wound up at novelette length once we were done with revisions, so it's not even like this is entirely recent. But it has just felt like novelettes and novellas are the fast track to spending a lot more time on something for a lot less potential.
Maybe it's that I'm at a point in my career where I'm selling a lot of what I write, but I'm finding I'm able to let go of that and go with what the story wants. I've heard lots of people who are focused on old science fiction arguing that novellas are the ideal form for the genre, but I haven't actually found that to be the case in other people's work. I like novelettes. They don't bloat so much, but they have more room for the world to complicate and iterate. I don't always need that, but sometimes I really enjoy it. Sometimes there are types of story that just won't fit in the classic short story range but don't have enough substance for novels, and they're worth telling, too. I feel like a novelette gives the reader much more of its world than most short stories. There are, of course, exceptions.
I have also noticed in general that the tendency to pull back and work on what I "ought" to be working on, in absence of outside forces confirming that "ought," doesn't always work very well. I've been bringing short stories and novelettes to the brink the entire last half of last year and then saying, "No, but you ought to work on novel revisions!" And indeed, this has been an incredibly personally difficult novel for me, for reasons that are major plot spoilers. But wrenching myself away from things that are working in a hare-brained attempt to work on something that isn't backs up the creative processes and gets them all tangled and sad.
So we won't be doing that. Instead, more novelettes. Because letting things develop further is really no bad thing, and will not, despite my hindbrain anxiety, result in a pile of unpublishable stories. And in any case they're not more publishable for having a few thousand words written on each and letting them just wait and languish.
So. Novelettes. Tl; dr: I'm fur 'em and wish to be more fur 'em in future.
Meanwhile, it reminded me that I've noticed a shift in my writing. I've always written at a variety of lengths, down to short-shorts and up to novels, but I have had a deliberate bias against the longer short forms up until fairly recently. They can be a right pain to sell, is the long and short of it, so when I got promising ideas that felt like they were going to be longer than the magical novelette line, I have been likely to put them aside half-finished and focus on something in the two to five thousand word range for which there are a kajillion markets.
I'm trying to stop that, because I really like some of my novelette ideas. They keep accreting text because I poke at them a bit at a time--I don't seem to want to give up on them, even as I say to myself, "Ugh, nobody wants anything longer than five thousand words." This is flatly untrue, and I know it's untrue--my first sale to Analog wound up at novelette length once we were done with revisions, so it's not even like this is entirely recent. But it has just felt like novelettes and novellas are the fast track to spending a lot more time on something for a lot less potential.
Maybe it's that I'm at a point in my career where I'm selling a lot of what I write, but I'm finding I'm able to let go of that and go with what the story wants. I've heard lots of people who are focused on old science fiction arguing that novellas are the ideal form for the genre, but I haven't actually found that to be the case in other people's work. I like novelettes. They don't bloat so much, but they have more room for the world to complicate and iterate. I don't always need that, but sometimes I really enjoy it. Sometimes there are types of story that just won't fit in the classic short story range but don't have enough substance for novels, and they're worth telling, too. I feel like a novelette gives the reader much more of its world than most short stories. There are, of course, exceptions.
I have also noticed in general that the tendency to pull back and work on what I "ought" to be working on, in absence of outside forces confirming that "ought," doesn't always work very well. I've been bringing short stories and novelettes to the brink the entire last half of last year and then saying, "No, but you ought to work on novel revisions!" And indeed, this has been an incredibly personally difficult novel for me, for reasons that are major plot spoilers. But wrenching myself away from things that are working in a hare-brained attempt to work on something that isn't backs up the creative processes and gets them all tangled and sad.
So we won't be doing that. Instead, more novelettes. Because letting things develop further is really no bad thing, and will not, despite my hindbrain anxiety, result in a pile of unpublishable stories. And in any case they're not more publishable for having a few thousand words written on each and letting them just wait and languish.
So. Novelettes. Tl; dr: I'm fur 'em and wish to be more fur 'em in future.
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no subject
Date: 2011-01-09 02:31 pm (UTC)In Mrissa's case, the link is going to give me a chance to read a story that I didn't see before, due to dire things in real life during the time of its publication, so that's cool. And she's not obligating anyone.
(Back in the GEnie days, I really hated it when people would try to obligate one to nominate their stuff, because they could check the forum and see whose name had complied.)
no subject
Date: 2011-01-09 02:41 pm (UTC)When my friends post saying "everybody else is doing it so I have to" I comment telling them that no, in fact they don't have to, and in fact it's completely unacceptable. Unless I already said that to them last year and they're doing it again, in which case I think about how much I like them really.
Link by all means. But why mention awards while you're doing it? If people like it, they can think of that all by themselves.
I posted about this when last year's Hugo longlist came out and things of mine were half a dozen votes from being nominated -- if I'd begged for nominations from my friends, they might actually have been on it. And if I had and if they had, I'd have felt horrible, whereas as it was, I felt really happy that people had actually liked them.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-09 02:53 pm (UTC)But this year a lot of newer writers seem to think that they have to list all their year's publications and mention the awards. Maybe next year they won't.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-09 03:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-09 03:36 pm (UTC)I'm sure there are people who look purely at the story and are above all personal feelings about things they know about the author's behaviour, but I don't rise to those heights.