No more Scroll
Filed under Writing Journal on March 14, 2006
Tagged: Janner's Regret, novellas
I’ve decided to go with the title “Janner’s Regret” for what is turning out to be a novella. Twenty thousand words is right around the corner. Only two magazines publish fantasy stories that long: Black Gate and F&SF. Interzone makes the cut at 15k.
The fantasy novella market is strictly limited to small press from what I can see. Carnifex Press publishes them in chapbook format. Poison Clan Press has been generous enough to consider my manuscript once it is complete.
I briefly considered trying to prune the story back under 15,000 words, but I’m not finished yet, and I keep coming up with additions required to strengthen certain plot elements. For example, “Regret” is not a “sword & sorcery” action story. There are a total of three fight scenes. To prevent the reader from getting bogged down by Janner’s internal struggle, I wanted to create a sense of impending doom that was hot on his tail, driving him and the reader forward. The difficulty was that I am only using a single POV–Janner. The obvious answer came to me last night, but it means adding some meat to the bones that were already in place.
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March 18th, 2006 at 12:25 am
Kam,
2 things. 1) Nothing past March 6 is showing up in your “What’s New” area. I had to click on the March 6 entry to see these last two. 2) I just read that Weird Tales is open and accepting work up to 20K. Don’t know if Janner’s Regret is their kind of story, but just wanted to let you know there is one more option out there.
March 18th, 2006 at 7:50 am
Yeah, something broke when I upgraded Wordpress. A friend of mine who helped me with the PHP for this site is trying to fix it for me. I’ll look at Weird Tales; thanks for the tip.
March 18th, 2006 at 8:05 am
Hmm, here’s the blurb on their guidelines page:
We’re looking for the best in fantasy-based horror, heroic fantasy, and exotic mood pieces—plus the occasional odd story that won’t fit anywhere else. No min. length, but less than 10000 words. Pays 3 cents/wd on publication.
Where did you see the 20k limit? I went to http://www.weirdtalesmagazine.com/
March 18th, 2006 at 10:05 am
http://community.livejournal.com/specficmarkets/
The Feb 4 entry.