As always, I think of the novella 'as a container, not its contents'.
Similar to Edgar Allan Poe, I like best a text (cum book) that you can read in one sitting and which results in one overall impression upon the reader.
So I have stolen the term 'novella' from the literary types, who use it most consistently for fictional work of between roughly 12,500 words and 25,000 words.
In practice, a novella today is usually around 19,000 words long.
(I think most of us regard fiction between 7500 words to about 15,000 words as either a novelette or a long short story, just as we tend to regard fiction over 30,000 words in length as a short novel.)
In terms of work that isn't fully or overtly fictional, like my work, this results a book of between 50 and 120 pages, depending on illustrations and formatting.
I think most of us can read a book like this, if it is clearly written and attractively laid out, in between 75 and 150 minutes - the same range of length as most movies/plays/ musicals and concerts.
My 'book' , "MO goes PO, 1939-1945" , is actually a series of 16 separate but connected essays easy of novella length.
Hopefully each will average around 12,500 words, giving an overall length for the entire series of 200,000 words.
I have had to condense the story greatly.
This meant I had to pick just sixteen key days, over a war that lasted six years and raged over 2000 separate days.
As a result, I have gone back 'n' forth/ forth 'n' back over the specific sixteen dates, so I can still tell the story succinctly but accurately and dramatically.
So here are my tentative dates and titles - always subject to further change, of course:
January 1st 1941 : "We Are The Dead".
March 15th 1941 : "Synthetic Hope".
May 20th 1941: "Life Unworthy" .
September 30th 1941 : "Thank You - And GOODBYE" .
January 30th 1942 : "Kristall Lust" .
March 12th 1942 : "Patient Betrayal" .
June 30th 1942 : "Censored" .
November 6th 1942 : "Going Native" .
January 29th 1943 : "Hill Of Beans" .
June 14th 1943 : "When Doctors Gossip" .
August 11th 1943 : "Fire This Time" .
October 30th 1943 : "Patricia, Harriet and Mae" .
January 25th 1944 : "Saved By Face" .
March 19th 1944 : "The Great White Hope" .
June 23rd 1944 : "Lazarus, Too" .
August 15th 1944 : "Blanket Harbour" .
Some will also have explanatory subtitles ...
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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