This weekend, I started my first novella. Up until now, I’ve very much been a novelist, even when I’m writing short stories. My average length for a short story is about 6000-6500 words. Growing up, I read short stories, and I read novels, and not a whole lot in-between.

For those not familiar, novella is a story category describing stories between 17500 to 40,000 words. Publishing-wise, a lot of novellas that get sold as digital singles are 30,000 to 50,000 words. The top end of that range is about the size that older SF novels used to be (especially if you go back through the Golden Age to the pulp years – those books were short!)

The rise of digital reading has opened up that middle ground into a whole new market – a chance to give readers a taste of a world, to tide over a publication gap in a series, and more.

Progress has been great so far, averaging more than 2,000 words per day. Right now, I’m attributing that success to a few factors:

1) It’s a world I know well.
2) As a shorter work, it’s easier to hold the whole thing in my head at once.
3) I’ve got the whole story outlined, chapter-by-chapter.

If I can keep this rate up (not too likely), I’ll have a rough draft done in about two weeks(!)