Normally I have a very easy time figuring out how long a piece of fiction (and by that I mean a work in progress) is going to be. The moment I write the first scene I can tell if it’s gonna be five thousand words, fifteen thousand words or novel-length. Usually I know on an even more granular level than that. But today it failed. I was working on my umpteenth version of the fantasy novel I’ve spent two months working on, and…as I wrote and wrote and wrote, the chapters started getting shorter and shorter and…I was like okay this is just gonna be twelve thousand words, not a novel. But then I finished it at 7,500 words.

SIGH. Happens sometimes. It’s a really weird, complex short story, and I think that I tie the pieces up together very nicely at the end. But who knows. Now I need to figure out another novel project I guess.

Or maybe I’ll just be a short story writer now. There’s certainly something attractive about that idea. It’s nice to finish things. Nice to submit them, nice to have the whole thing entirely under your control. The only not-nice thing is the audience, which is miniscule, but what’s the audience for a never-published novel?