Tuesday, 1 May 2018

From short stories to epic fantasy

I think I have made a mistake in the way I am working toward writing fiction. I started with short stories, which is great. Some were published elsewhere and then I was able to bundle them all into a couple of small collections. I also wrote a longer short story called Cooperworld which I self-published. Unless you are famous, there really isn't much of a market for a 17000-word story.

So essentially I went from something which was a standard 2000-5000 words in length, to something 100,000 words and up. I am currently at 130,000 words and although the end is in sight, I am still having to squint to see it.

I keep feeling tempted to write a quick scifi novel but know that if I stop, I will never finish the epic fantasy book. If there is one thing I have read numerous times, it is that you should always plough on until you are done, otherwise you never will. This is good advice and I fully agree. So additional advice would be - start something shorter and finish that because there is a mild feeling of despair when you look ahead and see the story stretching away into the dim distance.

I'd better get back to it...