My novella was born from a literary experiment that I decided to undertake in between completing my first novel and getting down to serious business with the second one that is still in progress. Typically when not working on a novel the writing I engage in is either piecing together a short story or an article. Recently I've added blogging to the mix as well, but I had no idea what a blog was (if they even existed yet) when I began "Feeding the Squirrels". The idea was to try my hand at an anthology of sorts. Rather than writing short stories that were completely independent of each other in my usual fashion I would pen a series of tales that featured the same main character/narrator. Each of these stories would make up the individual chapters of the book. I had no idea how many chapters I would write or how much content the individual snippets would add up to. What I did decide early on is that my story would be about a man (Michael) who recounts his experiences with a sequence of short term lovers, and each chapter/story would be named after the woman being featured in it. Since "Feeding the Squirrels" is written in first person point of view, and the perspective is that of a narcissist, one could say that the chapter names are ironic because each story is actually about Michael. The women affect his itinerary and his life to varying degrees, and the encounters reveal differing aspects of his character, but none are meant to stick around because by necessity of my experiment they need to give way to the next chapter/story/woman. The lineup of stories could have gone on indefinitely, but eventually I felt I had spun a sufficient number of loosely connected tales and the time had come to figure out how to tie them a little more neatly together. Upon completion I saw that my word count was too great for short story standards and too scant to be considered a novel. Realizing that I had a novella on hand I decided to take my experiment and marry it to an experimental form of publishing known as the e-book. So basically, "Feeding the Squirrels" came about as one whim led to another and before I knew it I was something I had never really planned to be - the author of an electronically published novella.
Excerpt: http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/9...
http://www.synergebooks.com/ebook_fee...