The latest installment of "The Journeyman" this one "In the Great North Woods" had been turned down by ANALOG. This is TOF's first rejection in a great long time.
The reason was that at 40,000 words, it was too long and TOF admits to some uneasiness over its length. A magazine is like a jigsaw puzzle and Trevor saw no way to fit a three-part serial into the page count; nor was there obvious break points for serial episodes.
OTOH, he likes the story and will give it another look if I can substantially reduce its length. Now the question is if I reduce a 40 kiloword story to a 20 kiloword story, is it still the same story?
Let the games begin!
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Now some of us fans of the series will feel like we are losing 20,000 good words. Maybe the Director's Cut can be saved for something later?
ReplyDeleteMaybe talk to the editor about running it as a special "complete in this issue novella"? (Though 40K's apparently even pushing the limits to be a novella and not a short novel.) Or just split it into only two parts? (Then you only need to find one "break point", around the middle; at least, it would probably take less work to rewrite it enough for there to be one, than to try to cram the whole thing into half the wordcount.)
ReplyDeleteI admit that I don't know enough about magazine-publishing to know if I'm talking nonsense or not, though.
Really looking forward to it!
ReplyDeleteReally looking forward to it!
ReplyDeletePlease find a way to print all 40,000 words somewhere somehow. I love this series! Thanks, Lori A.
ReplyDelete