Sorting Our Serena...

I've been busy this week putting together a website for my pseudonym, Serena Lake.

A few months ago when I bought my domain name, I also bought one for Serena. The intention was to create a website for her in the Autumn, but something has been telling me to get it done now.

I've learnt that it's advisable to listen (and action) those instinct alerts, because when I ignore them I quickly find out that it was the wrong thing to do.

I'm going to continue the Carol's Corner blog covering my writing, research and the news about competitions and other literature related items- that I sometimes venture into talking about. But while I may also talk about history related items here, I'll perhaps give a different slant or more detail on Serena's blog.

Serena's blog on the website will concentrate only the historical romance side of my writing- and reading. I may even share opinions of research books and useful websites.

I'm on the final adjustments now, and as soon as I'm happy I will get my domain transferred, and begin blogging. And of course let everyone know it's officially launched.

Making the website has taken a lot of thought as I had to decide what image I wanted to suggest by my choices of design, colour and pages, as well as their content.

Having learnt a few skills over the years with this blog I could at least create pages without any problem, though learning how to get where I want to is still a bit hit and miss. :-)

Serena's Lady with a Fan...

I'm going to let you have a quick look at the website before it is finalised- still trying to work out the contact options so that's still missing, but otherwise it's 90% there.

I'll be expanding pages when needed, and adding social media links.

So if you want a quick peek, then follow this link.

Novella or Novel- What's the Length?

I doubt there can ever be a truly definitive answer to what it the actual length of a novella or a novel because there are so many variables: market, genre and publisher's requirements (such as Mills and Boon who have set lengths for certain categories).

So I was interested to read an article in this weekend's Arts/Books section of the Independent online, about The Novella Award. Their shortlist was announced on the 17th July, and the entries to this year's competition had to be between 20,000 and 40,000 words.

Perhaps the question is when does a novella become a novel?

The My Weekly Pocket Novels are now 50,000 words, though the version from The People's Friend is only 42,000 words. So both these are higher than the 40,000 mentioned above. But neither would be considered novel length by a mainstream publisher.

Perhaps we need to start using 'mini novel' for those word counts that fit between 40-80,000 words.

The writers of the past didn't have these issues; they went to both extremes.

'Animal Farm' by George Orwell has 29,966 words, so although it is actually novella length everyone thinks of it as a novel- probably because at the time it was written it was a novel!

While Margaret Mitchell's 'Gone With The Wind' was a large novel of 418,053 that could rival some of the Game of Thrones novels now available.

You can find some interesting facts on the wide range of word lengths on the Electric Lit website, in the post titled Infographic: Word Counts of Famous Books. (The figures from the above titles came from here.)

No doubt in a few years these figures will change and we'll still be uncertain about what length is a novella, and the minimum for a novel.

What are your thoughts on the subject?

Which is a novel and which a novella?