This week has been a great week.

Well, it has a very productive seven days anyway. About this time last Thursday I published the opening couple of pages of another story that I'd started. It was very early days in the life of that particular story and I wanted to share the demonstration of how I was learning to add a bit of subtle character depth whilst setting the scene. Anyway, now it's a 20,000 word fully fledged novella, it was a hectic weekend.

The thing is, when I read over the first chapter or two that I had written, and started to continue, the story took on a life of it's own and shot off on a tangent, never to recover to the original intended path - and it was great! Much better than I could of planned. Late Sunday afternoon I was really surprised by how tired I felt, not physically, but mentally; I was knackered!

I decided that enough was enough so closed the laptop and went in search of dinner. I thought I'd chill for a bit before bed. Except it didn't work out quite that way. After dinner I just had to go back to the laptop, there were so many ideas rushing around in my head. It was straight back into the story and away I went for the next four or five hours. It was addictive. The next time I looked up I was alone again, everyone else had gone to bed, a cold cup of tea on the table. If I was knackered before, I was now completely and utterly emotionally exhausted. I remembered that my eyes had leaked at parts, and that I'd chuckled at other parts, and that I'd had to focus really hard in yet more parts but apart from that my head was jelly, my mind just didn't want to work anymore. 

But still the ideas kept coming. More sleepless nights ahead, but it's such an addictive read (Disclaimer: that may be a slightly biased opinion).

I'm guessing that there is still another 8,000 or 9,000 words to be written regardless of the direction it takes but watch this space. And if there are any volunteer Beta readers out there, drop me an email. I don't have a clue what the title is going to be - how can I, I don't even know where the story is going to end?!

Now I move onto a different but timely, subject of discussion; when is a book finished?

There are lots of thoughts around the length of a story, the number of words it should contain, and there are numerous opinions around the subject all over the internet. This is going to sound very naive to some, but I definitely subscribe to 'natural length' theory; the story is over, when it's over. I don't want to 'pad' the story just to make a word count. I don't want to take parts out because it will detract from the whole story - if it didn't they wouldn't be there in the first place.

I want the readers to be taken on a journey, an enjoyable roller coaster ride, not one that takes short cuts or slows down as it pushes through a quagmire of dribble just to prolong the ride, because it detracts from the quality of the ride - or the story in this case. 

Recently Judi of Santel epublishing/ ProofreadNZ has introduced me to Amazons 'Kindle Singles' which is designed for those that want to publish (or read) non standard-length stories. Well worth knowing about.

Without readers there is no point in writing books - without Authors there are no books!