It's been a while since I've posted anything on SNG, mostly because I don't want to be "one of those bloggers" with nothing to say but plenty to write. Right? Yep. Unfortunately, that's sort of the case here.
However, Eunoia Review, a lovely e-zine that posts fiction and poetry daily, has accepted a small piece of mine, which will appear around June 2012 (gasp)!
Today's subject of conversation is word length, quality over quantity, etc. Do editors not choose works based on how easily they will fit into a set number of pages? Wouldn't a place like Clarkesworld or Lightspeed or Fantasy (all of which publishes two original stories a month) want to give the reader a happy combination of quantity and quality? Sure, why not. I've seen stories in all three pushing somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 words, don't get me wrong. I realize they publish shorter pieces. But those seem somewhat rare to me—I'm not complaining at all about this—but my question is just how well a market looks at length vs. quality.
The reason I wonder is that most of my stories, lately, have been coming in at around 3,500 words. That seems a happy number of words, not too much, not too little. I fit what I feel the story needs into the words, I take out the things I dislike. It's strange to me that they always come out to 3,500. Spooky stuff, Microsoft Word is.
Remember at the beginning where I hinted that this was a blog about nothing? Yep. Sorry.
Thoughts concerning word length in fiction would be cool.
