Oops, I Wrote a Novella

I recently wrote a piece where I explained why we authors need to stop writing novellas, because nobody wants to read them. So naturally, I just wrote a novella. Because even I don’t listen to the stupid advice on this stupid blog.

The story behind the story is that I was at a college reunion of sorts, except I wasn’t with the reunion, I was with the band. I wasn’t in the band. I was just hanging out with the band. It was my brother’s band, so that’s not quite as weird as it sounds. Anyway, at this reunion, there was a woman in a blue dress with the most amazing rack. And she kept trying to get her husband’s attention, and he was completely ignoring her.

So that gave me the gist of the story idea. A woman in her 40s, who is still really fucking hot, but for some reason is invisible to most men. I have no idea what’s up with that. But I know a lot of 40-something women, and they tell me it’s definitely a thing. They just kind of disappear somewhere between 40 and 50 and then nobody can see them any more. Or, rather, they don’t see them as sexual beings. So my idea was to put this lady I saw into a story where some random stranger gives her the attention she isn’t getting from her husband.

I figured I’d write a short story. But then I got this weird idea about doing a tick-tock point-of-view thing, where I’d go back and forth between the POV of the woman, and that of the suitor. Switching at scene boundaries. I was afraid it might be annoying or gimmicky, but I sent the first couple scenes to some test readers and they said it worked. (The reviewers on Amazon agree, it turns out.)

So that device made my short story longer. And then this happened:

I intended to write a short story, but my characters refuse to get out of bed. So I guess it's going to be a novella.

— α geek (@alfageeek) June 21, 2016

That’s 100% true. I just didn’t have enough time in a 2,500 word short story to let my characters do everything they wanted to sexually.

It ended up about 9,000 words. That’s three to four times the proper length for a short story. But only half the length of a standard novella. It’s a deminovella. (I looked that up; it’s not a thing.)

But what are you going to do? There isn’t anything I can cut, and I don’t want to pad it out with a bunch of crap it doesn’t need. So I guess it is what it is.

Once I finished it, I polled my Twitter followers about what I should do with it:

Twitter is so helpful

So I took their advice and made it into a little book. I launched it on Amazon, and you can get it at mybook.to/regrets for $0.99, £0.99, or whatever the minimum price for a Kindle book is where you live.

I hope you like it!