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 fiv...