The Author Guy Blog by Larry B. Gildersleeve

28th June 2024

Hello out there,

Welcome back. In my tenth blog, back in January of this year, I wrote about works of fiction that

had made an impact on me, and, in fact, inspired me to become a novelist. My focus then was on

brief books – what today would be known as a novella – and how some of them gained

worldwide reader acclaim and awards such as the Pulitzer and the Nobel.

I’ve self-published four novels (word count greater than 40,000 – mine were around 65,000) and

my fifth, to be released early next year, will come in at around 75,000 words. But when I began

my author journey ten years ago, it was the novella (21,000 to 39,000 words) I envisioned myself

writing, and it’s a place I believe I will find myself returning to with my sixth manuscript.

An even lesser word count, traditionally topping off at no more than 8,000 words, is the realm of

short stories. I recently read of the passing of Alice Munro, a Canadian author who published

fourteen collections of short stories over five decades, and in the process won the Nobel Prize in

2013. In accepting the award, she was quoted as saying: “I would really hope that people will see

the short story as an important art, not something one plays around with until they’ve written a

great novel.”

Telling a compelling story in far fewer words will be, I believe, a much more difficult endeavor,

and certainly new territory for me. Nothing will be easy; nothing will be simple. I’m up for the

challenge.

Until next week … Vaya con Dios

Larry B. Gildersleeve