Day 69

[truepenny]

Tried going down to one oxycodone last night, vis-à-vis the RLS. It did not work. I am disheartened. Also draggy and exhausted and probably a Very Slow Loris Indeed.

On the plus side, PT is going well. My physical therapist is very encouraging. I'm down to one crutch, and we have hopes that I will be able to dispense with crutches entirely sometime next week. This would be a TREMENDOUS boon.

I'm doing better on other fronts: more energy, less nausea. The writing is kind of rocky, but not dramatically outside normal parameters. "Thirdhop Scarp," the Booth story I've been working on since approximately the dawn of time, is now 16,000 words long, and it's not what you could even call close to being finished. It is obviously a novella, which explains why it would not work when I kept stubbornly trying to make it a novelette.*

I did not want to write a novella (which would be why I kept stubbornly trying to make it a novelette), as there is practically no market for them, but the story does not care. And I would much rather it be a good, even if unsaleable, novella, than a bad (and therefore even more unsaleable and also embarrassing) novelette.

Actually, at the moment, what I want is for it to be a finished novella. We can work on "good" later.

Writing. Still, blessedly, not performance art.

---
*Definitions by word lengths here, courtesy of SFWA. Personally, I hate the word "novelette," but if we're going to make artificial distinctions by word length (which, obviously, we are), we have to call them something. I have a tendency to write novelettes, particularly, though not exclusively, with Booth, and I admit, I do not think of, for instance, "The Wall of Clouds," as a short story.

Also please note, while I'm being cantankerous, that "novelette" is another English word, like "cigarette," "kitchenette," "Rockette," etc., that provides a useful clue as to the pronunciation of my surname. You don't say it "novel-ay," do you?

Comments

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

I am all kinds of excited at the prospect of another Booth...piece. Whatever length category it happens to fall into.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Also please note, while I'm being cantankerous, that "novelette" is another English word, like "cigarette," "kitchenette," "Rockette," etc., that provides a useful clue as to the pronunciation of my surname. You don't say it "novel-ay," do you?

I never got that impression, no.

*ducks*

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

And a new Booth story would be awesome, regardless of length.

[oneminutemonkey.livejournal.com]

Since we have novel, novella, and novelette, I'm going to start a movement to change "short story" to novelina.

[pameladean]

No, no, it must have more letters than "novelette," or the rule that the longer the term, the shorter the piece, will be broken!

P.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Also please note, while I'm being cantankerous, that "novelette" is another English word, like "cigarette," "kitchenette," "Rockette," etc., that provides a useful clue as to the pronunciation of my surname. You don't say it "novel-ay," do you?

I would be more perplexed at how people manage to mispronounce your surname except that my husband's surname is invariably misspelt or mispronounced (which is one of the reasons why I kept mine--most people can both spell it and pronounce it correctly).

[marycatelli]

Ouch!

Ah, the Unpublishable Void of story lengths. How loathsome.

It's never fun.

[xamaque.livejournal.com]

The novella seems to me like the form most likely to benefit by the growing popularity of the ebook. In print, it always suffered of being too long for anthologies(unless you are the BIG NAME AUTHOR) and too short to be a stand-alone book.

Anyhow, I hope it will be available in some form soon, as I love the Booth stories!

[heresluck]

::votes for novellini::

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

*also votes for novellini*

What sort of sauce does one put on novellini?