One of my writing goals while being on summer holidays this 2024 was to complete, polish, and get the science fiction story (Project X) to a point so I could publish it. Project X began its life as a short story that had sat in a number of slush piles, and while receiving excellent feedback, it was longer than the 7,500 sweet spot a number of magazines like. As I said, I’d received excellent feedback, with one saying I should make it a standalone piece. It would have to be larger, however, and I struggled with trying to work out how I could do that when the plot was already tight. But the longer I thought about it the more I realised that I should tell it as two connected stories. That meant writing another story that would stand on its own and find a powerful twist that would connect them both together. That is what I’ve been working on.
So last night, I hit one of my word count goals. I increased the word count for Project X, to 18,281, and if use the novelette / novella guidelines, I have now passed the 17,500 limit for a novelette and am going to say that it is now a novella. Yeah! And if the category was 20,000 words, well then I’d still be 1,719 words away, which I’m also happy with because I’m aiming for 20K now. I’ll let you know how it goes.
My other small announcement was that I just finished doing the narration on my story The Legend of the Northwest Pine Octopus. It’s due out at AntipodeanSF in March (Issue 305) this year as an e-submission on their web site, and the recording will go live a few months after that I expect. This time I used my Rode videomic Pro+ shotgun microphone, and I put the internal shroud back on it. I think this improved the sound quality.