Growing Pains

Vamps II has hit a familiar point at just short of 17,000 words: is this a novel or a novella? That's to say, is there enough story here to make a short-ish novel, or is it heading for around the 40,000 word mark?

In a sense, and following the logic of the last couple of posts, it doesn't matter; it will take as many words as it needs for the story to be told, especially if the publication will be online. On the other hand, I've been wondering whether to make it part of a collection. In my head, the model for that would be Viriconium. I mean that in a broad structural sense only, I'm not making any comparison between myself and Harrison.

One of the features of Viriconium was its deliberate focus on undermining the tropes of fantasy writing. In this case, it would be the tropes of the vampire novel, but I feel disinclined to do that if I was doing it just for the bantz. Alternatively, I described Vamps II as YA, but a YA who had grown up in a war zone. Maybe it is YA writing (about which I am deeply ambivalent) that needs to be got at. Joe Abercrombie has been here already, of course.

Playing with ideas just now, I hit upon having the Margaret/Ephraim relationship turn in part on competing ideas of what human society ought to be (in their terms). In that case, could I use, for example, Plato's Republic as a straw man to play with? In the end, there has to be a good story, but that doesn't mean I can't bury other things within it. If I still had them (and I might) I could use my old Moral Philosophy lecture outlines as a source to mine. Sure, that's cliched, but I am without shame.

My ambivalence about YA writing, by the way, is that it seems to me to be ossifying into a writing/publishing/marketing category which is in danger of missing what it is that the putative target audience might actually respond to. I have only my own experience to draw on, but I clearly remember that when I was a young teen, say from twelve onwards, I was reading what, these days, would not be marketed at young adults (Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, Alastair MacLean, Dennis Wheatley, Isaac Asimov), and by eighteen I was reading Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I don't think I was especially precocious. On this general theme, and for a pleasant change, the discussion of Young Adult fiction on Wikipedia (accessed today) is quite helpful.