For a while there I was writing Long, as in 80,000 - 90,000 words long. There are still some long books in me, but I’m also still writing short form. In the case of my latest title, it’s a novelette: around 14,000 words, half the length of the typical novella. Which is why I call it a bedtime story. Click the image below for product link!
Cover image by alexander krivitskiy @krivitskiy unsplash.com
Three key things about THIS TIME:
As noted above, it’s short, and it’s priced accordingly. I hope a new reader might be tempted by those two things. :-) It does, however, convey an entire story and can be read as a standalone.
The lead characters are Amber Barnett, a fine-jewelry sales manager, and Leon Silva, a musician.
This is a second-chance story: we open on the scene where they break up. The story picks up ten years later.
When I first began toying with Amber and Leon’s story, I thought it might be a novella. Then I thought it might be a full-fledged novel. After a year of dithering (while I wrote other things) I realized that it could be a full-length novel, but it wouldn’t be a romance novel.
That’s not to say that it wouldn’t have a happy ending! It totally would! But at novel-length, Amber and Leon’s story would be more about their professional lives and the business they launch together, putting it in general fiction. Which is fine. But I’m focusing on the romance at this point in time. Which meant for these two characters, a shorter treatment would be the better choice.
I did not, in short, need to mention their business at all. It’s something I needed to know about for other reasons, but it’s not germane to Amber & Leon’s love story.
Once that thought had simmered for a while, I was ready to go back to the project and complete it. Writing a short thing like this is fun: I get to create the characters and their context, figure out enough of their back-stories and their futures, place them in the timeline of this story universe, and then garnish with, for example, an Abyssinian cat named Lawrence of Arabia (Larry for short).
Amber is a good friend of my character Jan de Witt of SUGAR DADDY. If you like THIS TIME, you may enjoy Jan’s story too. Happy reading!