Just posted "Heading West" as fiction here. I'm going to try to do that once or twice a month for the foreseeable future. If they prove popular, I'll up the post count a little. For now I'll restrain myself to shorter works with prior publication. I may eventually serialize longer work or post trunk items, we'll see.
I was talking over dinner at Foolscap about the relationship between novels and food. Back in the old days, say, 1970, novels were skinny. Go to a used bookstore with a good speculative fiction stock and look at all the old yellow-spined DAW titles. Note how thin they are. 40,000, 60,000 words. Nowadays, outside of YA, a novel has to be 90,000 - 120,000 to even get started.
Then books like M.M. Kaye's The Far Pavilions (Bantam Books, 1979) started appearing. Big books. Books that people liked and wanted to buy and read. Combine this with fantasy's apparent genetic tendencies toward trilogies (and worse), and we all got bigger.
Much like food. Restaurant portions, from drive through quickies to Claim Jumper feasts, have gotten larger and larger during the years of my adult life. We conflate portion size with abundance, I think. Readers like a big bite...what is the relationship there?
I'm sure
pnh or casacorona can comment much more knowledgably about the size trend in books (not to mention correct my errors), but it strikes me as an odd and interesting coincidence.More to come.
the_child wants taking to her Do-Jump class.