Come From Away is hovering, at last check, around forty-eight thousand words. Forty-eight thousand. Two thousand more words and I’ll have a NaNoWriMo (yes, I had to look that up because I kept simply typing a string of random letters after Na) length novel, albeit one that took much, much longer than a month to write.
Except – I don’t have two thousand more words to say about Come From Away.
This is all I want: I want a fifty thousand word novella. I’m sure that sometime in the past, I read that publishers want a minimum of fifty thousand words, and this factoid buried itself deep in my brain, and now it keeps surfacing to nag me about not writing those final two thousand words. Last week, Come From Away was only forty-five thousand words. So there were three thousand words left via Jane sneaking out to assemble a stroller and Peter dying his hair. I put in their argument to strengthen the ending. Maybe strengthen is the wrong word. Maybe the right word is pad.
Do I really have two thousand more words to say? Should I stop? Should I start putting more energy behind my faerie story?
Two thousand words seems so puny when I’m writing one-off short stories. I can almost never squeeze my stories down to that length. But then, when I need to wring out a bit more action from forty-eight thousand words of action, I’m like a dried out turtle shell in the desert. I got nothing.