So, I Accidentally Wrote a Novella
The Woman in the Coffin by Nathan Long (Oolong Books, February 18 2021)
So, I accidentally wrote a novella.
When I told him about it, John O’Neill congratulated me on my sagacity for following the current trend in novellas, but that was never my intention. I’m so out of the loop I didn’t even know there was such a trend. What I had set out to do was to entertain my friend Elizabeth Watasin by writing a serial adventure set in her Dark Victorian world and sending her a chapter every week. It just so happened when I put all the chapters together they turned out to be novella length and not too terrible, so there you go. And, yes, as you have already deduced, not only is it a novella, it’s a fan-fic novella. I so fell in love with the swooniness of Elizabeth’s world and characters that I was inspired to write a Watasin-adjacent story of my own. And, to add to its other sins, it’s very possible I won’t write a follow up.
Given all that (fan-fic, runtish length, no ‘long tail’) what the hell am I doing making The Woman in the Coffin the first thing I self-publish? Honestly, I don’t know. I have two finished full length novels in the trunk that would only require a copy-edit and a cover to put up on Amazon, but did I publish those? No. I picked the thing that requires half a page of mea culpa to explain, and which I had to ask Elizabeth’s permission to publish.