Define – Short?

So I wrote more on this short story, whose name I think I’m going to change, and I have only two small scenes, and one significant scene, left to write. This all fine and dandy except, for the fact that this ‘short’ story is now almost ten thousand words long.

The second short story I ever got published, the editor actually wrote to me and said that ‘it was very good but really short – did I want to try and make it longer?’

I couldn’t conceive of how to make it longer…and I still don’t ,if I think about it. But now, I find that my average ‘short’ story is 7-8 thousand words. Most magazines and anthologies have a cap around six thousand or lower.

I have yet to edit the story – as I am not done writing it – and that might bring down the word count but I don’t think it will do so in any real significant way.

I don’t know if this growth of the length of my stories is simply because that is what my Muse is feeding me, or if it is because I’m writing in the world of Jonathan Alvey, which I know so well, and am so invested in, that I can’t cut out the extraneous. That I can’t help but put in too much of the world and his reaction to it.

I’m not going to stress over this – I write for the sake of telling the tale. I no longer fret about ‘will someone accept it?’ I hope to get more work published, but that isn’t my job – My job is to write.

Still, sometimes I think I should challenge myself to write a short story that is actually… well, short. Maybe after the work for getting ‘Tomorrow Wendell’ ready for print is done, and I’ve wrapped up this short story, and finished the fourth novel … oh, who am I kidding?

 

Filed under: Writing Tagged: anthology, current work in progress, edits, Jonathan Alvey, magazine, muse, novel, plot, short story, Tomorrow Wendell, Urban Fantasy, writer, writing, Xchyler Publishing