Author: Teel

I have been getting a lot of backtalk for over a month now that a novel of 50,000 words is not a novel, but a novella. First, I would like to remind my audience that 50,000 words is the bare minimum number required. It is not a goal I am aiming to meet, to the word. In fact, I hope to be able to surpass it easily. Second, I want to let you in on some research I’ve done on the subject:

Major publishers in America will (generally) not even consider an unpublished author’s first novel unless it is between 60,000 and 70,000 words. I guess many first-time writers write much, much more than that. Still, the industry standard for first-published novels is not far from the bare minimum asked of MENoWriMo.

The Encyclopedia Britannica says of the novel that it is “an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting,” and that novellas are “short and well-structured narrative, often realistic and satiric in tone … Originating in Italy during the Middle Ages, the novella was based on local events that were humorous, political, or amorous in nature.” According to this, it is very possible that one or more of the books written for MENoWriMo will in fact be a novella, depending upon whether it is “based on local events that were humorous, political, or amorous in nature.”

More than one major publisher has pegged their average novel around 80,000 words. Clearly this is half again as long as the minimum length for a MENoWriMo, but this is still only about 320 pages, and not what I would consider a “long” novel. A MENoWriMo novel can’t be much shorter than 200 pages, if printed to industry specifications. Sure, I won’t be writing the next Cryptonomicon (918 pages) or Snow Crash (471 pages), but that doesn’t mean I won’t be writing a novel.

Depending upon the content, of course.

I’m stuck in a weird place tonight. I have been for a few hours. I’m tired, and I don’t really have the ability to stay up past midnight actually getting any useful work done and still make it to work in the morning, but I also have such anticipation of the official start time that I’m feeling anxious. Like somehow at midnight it will all come to me and I’ll hammer out a novel in one night. Or .. I certainly don’t know what. I’ve been doing what I can to limit thinking ahead about what i want to do for my own novel for a few reasons. I was chatting with Sara earlier today, and I noticed that in her timezone, May was only 40 minutes away, while I still had to wait nearly 10 hours. She told me that she probably wouldn’t even get started for another 10 days (for the very reasonable explanation of “finals”), and I wasn’t sure what my reaction should be. I know I’m feeling cramped by a month already. Maybe because I haven’t been thinking ahead. Maybe because I finished Snow Crash today and found out that it had taken around three years to write.

Of course, MENoWriMo is not intended by for to churn out novels of the quality of Snow Crash. That book had crazy amounts of research folded into it. MENoWriMo novels should be nearly the antithesis of that work. We are talking about wordcount here, not research and quality. Wordcount. Still, I don’t know how safe it would be for me to try to take weeks off. Heck, I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to do about TV. Break out tapes and watch every show’s final 3-4 episodes after they air? I can’t do that entirely, since a lot of my favorite programming runs opposite my other favorite programs, sometimes three at a time. Yargh!

Only an hour and a half to go. I hope I can sleep. Maybe I should stay up, eat the rest of that Watermelon, and go to bed when I’ve relaxed. I thought about grabbing a book and reading it until I became tired, but then I worry that I will find myself writing like the author I’m reading. Then I think that that wouldn’t be too bad, but … I don’t know what to think. the sorts of things I’ve been reading lately, I’ll probably end up writing some very hard sci-fi. If you didn’t know sci-fi came in hard, then you’d probably not like hard sci-fi. I’m going to try to find something else to distract me from this.

Not money though. I’ll just stress out. I keep worrying that I won’t be able to afford to make all my payments or that I’ll end up paying too much in interest. I know I’m not in any sort of financial catastrophe, that I will certainly be able to pay all my bills, and that with the sort of debt I’ve gotten myself under the idea of “too much debt” is really just a matter of degrees. No need to worry. Worry won’t change anything. Only calm, rational planning can do any good where money is concerned. Calm and rational is not what I am right now, though. Else I’d be in bed hours ago.