Sholpan 2.0 is finished!

Today I finished the second draft of the novella Sholpan, only two days after the deadline I set for myself.  Here are the stats:

ms pages: 173
words: 37,466
file size: 94 KB
parts: 5
start date: 1 Aug 2011
end date: 15 Aug 2011

I decided to divide it into parts because I read somewhere that novellas aren’t typically divided into chapters, and I felt that foregoing chapter divisions would give it more of a sense of unity.

Still, I divided it into five parts, which essentially function as very large chapters.  I did this because it seemed that the story needed it, to better develop conflict and theme, as well as the transitions and turning points.

Like I’ve said in the earlier posts, this is a “companion novella,” which means that it repeats one of the story lines from the novel with additional scenes that (hopefully) elaborate and flesh out that particular story line.  Ideally, this will entice readers of the novella to pick up the full-length novel, and give readers of the novel a satisfying experience by using the new scenes to cast everything else in a new light.

By my entirely non-scientific calculations, Sholpan contains about 80% repeated material from the novel (with a little touching up and fleshing out to get more inside of Stella’s head) and 20% entirely new material, most of it in the form of flashbacks to Stella’s life before she was captured and enslaved by the Hameji.  It ends about halfway through Stella’s story arc from Bringing Stella Home, and includes one of the major twists, but hopefully that won’t spoil too much.

In terms of story, I think there are some subtle deviations between Stella’s arc in the novel, and Stella’s arc in the novella.  Even though the novella ends just after one of the novel’s major shifts, the ending felt very satisfying–almost a little too much.  Still, it’s good for the story to be complete in itself, and there are enough loose ends that I think it will drive interest in the novel.

Anyhow, I’ve sent the project out to a couple of alpha readers, just to get a sense for whether or not I’m totally off base.  If all goes well there, I’ll send it out to my copy editor and get it up for sale sometime in mid-September.  I haven’t tried out the $.99 price point yet, so this will be a good test case to see how it works.

For those of you who are interested, here’s the cover:

And that’s about it.  I’m leaving the day after next for Worldcon, so I’ll do a post on that before I head out.  Probably won’t write much this week, but hopefully the con will help me make connections, pick up a few pointers, and get a good feel for the current zeitgeist in the science fiction and fantasy genres.  More on that to come.