So I started a new novel. I swear, it's like every short story I start now veers too long and then becomes something more than a short story, because I don't think a short story should be thirty pages long. I love horror collections but those stories are way way too long. I truly believe they are novel attempts that faded out around that page count and were reconstructed to fit a short story narrative and then submitted to an anthology.
That's something else I've noticed; a lot of horror writers publish their stories not in journals but in anthologies. It always seems like somebody like Ellen Datlow or Ellen Datlow herself is putting together another anthology. It's surely some quirk of the genre I've just never noticed before now.
But those stories are too long. So once a story I'm writing hits around twenty pages I either stop and read it over a few times and see if I've just got wordy here and there or if it should have been a longer work. If it's the latter, I usually just drag it into the Various folder on my desk top for the time being or possibly forever. With others, I sort of like where it's going and can feel more of it swirling around in my head and fingertips and so keep working on it.
It's become easier for me to admit that I'm officially working on a novel. I had never been a novelist, really, until the publication of The Orchard Is Full of Sound. Before that book, I was solidly a short story writer and a hundred percent content with that. But after Orchard, I started a story that became Oblivion Angels; and now I've started started a story that's become The Old Power (originally titled Sister Hall). I'm at about page twenty-five on The Old Power and so it's only just been born as a novel.
With this being my six novel (the fifth, Oblivion Angels, comes out Tuesday) I'm now at five novels and four story collections. Once this sixth is published (Lord willing) I'll have two more novels than collections and then there it is.
I'm proud of Oblivion Angels and really eager to see it come out with my publisher, Cowboy Jamboree Press. Adam Van Winkle, the publisher there, has published my last several books and will publish (if he likes them in manuscript) whatever books I write from here on. We have an agreement that CJ will have exclusive rights to all my prose books - fiction, essays, short stories, etc.
But I also have a collection of stories presently in the works - Until the Going Down of the River. That manuscript is at just over a hundred pages right now, and I just finished another story to include in the draft called "To Open Hills," published by Wilson Koewing at his journal Bottle Rocket. You can read it at the Selected Writing page here at Bent Country.
