I finished the new version of my "brokeback erotica" story. It clocks in at a little over 10,000 words. Whoops. I can whittle it down to the 8,000 word limit, but I'm pretty certain that the length has done me in. There's less than two weeks before the deadline, which means that most of the space in the anthology has probably already been filled. Even if there's 10,000 words left to be filled, it's more likely that the editor's looking for two or three normal-length stories to fill that space, not one big-ass novelette.

So.... What to do with it? Well, I'll polish it up and send it out anyway. At this point, I consider it an "introduction" (which I always sort of did to begin with) - a way of letting the editor know that I'm appreciative of her inviting me, that I can write well (it is well-written, if nothing else), that I don't crap out on deadlines, and that I'd like to be considered for invites on future anthologies.

And then, after it's sent back to me, I'll send it out to a few other markets. If no one bites, I'll expand it to novella length (as a companion piece for "At the Edge of Ellensburg") and put it away as inventory. Maybe someday I'll have enough cowboy/Ellensburg erotic novellas written that I can slap together some kind of collection. I know, I know: no one gives a shit about collections written by authors that no one's heard of. Then again, maybe it'll become a must-have book for the good student body of Central Washington University, and I'll gain a notoriety of sorts - as the Cormac McCarthy of erotica. lol. You never know.

EDIT: I've retitled the story. It's now called: "The Unattainable"

Labels: erotica