Hello, again

Well, I’ve been MIA again for a long while, haven’t I?

What inspired me to post today is an email from Regan Walker. She is featuring Dancing on Coals on her blog today, and her review is really exceptionally nice. Check it out:

http://reganromancereview.blogspot.com/2016/06/new-review-ellen-oconnells-dancing-on.html

Regan also reports she is getting 14,000 visits to her blog site a month now, which is fantastic. Also don’t forget Regan writes romance herself – Georgian, Regency and Medieval – so you may want to check those out too.

As to my news, such as it is, the good is I have been writing, working on the Jamie Lenahan/Caroline Tindell story. The bad news is, of course, that I’ve been doing it slowly, very slowly.

At least until recently when I seem to actually be in gear, which one can hope means I’m over the blahs. There is, of course, always the chance that I just have close-to-the-end-hurry-and-get-it done-itis. That’s not to say the story will be out next week or anything. Even after I’m done, there’s more research to this one than I realized when I started, and I’ve just skipped over and left it for the end in some places. Also, beta reads, editing, proofing, but I’m finally close.

The plan, you may remember, was to write a novella to send to the mailing list and publish Luke’s Eyes. Alas, as usual I’ve screwed up my own plans. I have at least 3 scenes left to write, and this “novella” is venturing into short novel territory. I think I’ve set out here before how writers and publishers divide things by word count:

Short Story – 1,000 – 7,500 words
Novellette – 7,500 – 20,000 words
Novella – 20,000 – 40,000 words
Novel – 40,000 -110,000

Of course hardly anyone has ever heard of a novellette, and what most writers do is ignore the category and add it to short story. So anything up to 20,000 words is labeled short story (except for some indies, who happily label their 10,000 word stories as novels, but that’s ignorance or perhaps deliberate ignorance on behalf of aggressive marketing).

There’s also a lot of debate over where it’s reasonable to start calling something a novel. I think that 40,000 is low. Some change that to 50,000, and I’d put it more like 60,000. Anyway, this new story of mine has just crossed the 40,000 mark, and I plan to keep calling it a novella.

For those of you that only want to hear about pages, this novella is going to end up at about half the page count of Beautiful Bad Man and Into the Light, so it would be 140-150 pages.

I don’t have a title yet. The first one that occurred to me was Race With A Rogue, which made me laugh because it sounds like a Regency. Right now I’m torn between The Truce and The Journal, both of which are apropos.

I don’t have a blurb yet, but the basic premise is that Jamie Lenahan and his brother-in-law Nolan Burke, who you may remember started the Hubbell Automobile Company in Into the Light, have agreed to drive a 1,000-mile automobile race for a wealthy collector. When Nolan falls ill the day before they are to leave, Jamie sets out alone. To his surprise and hers, who does he see at the start but Miss Caroline Tindell, the girl her family sent to Europe to end her affair with him some years before. Also the girl he lied to his best friend about and said he was never serious and knew she wasn’t either.

So most of the story is the race, but it ends up in Hubbell, Kansas, where the Van Cleves and Suttons pop up again for a scene or two.

Check out Regan’s blog, why don’t you?

~Ellen