There's this truism which says a story is finished when the thought of revising it one more time makes you cry.

I'm about at that stage with Jessamine, which is on its fifth draft and was my Clarion West application story, but since I last looked at it, I know I've improved as a writer and my CW instructors did have a few things to say about it which could nudge me in the right direction toward revising again. So now I have to decide: is it finished, or not?

Questions, questions. I may just try to finish Year of the Rabbit and possibly rename that, and come back to Jessamine when I've developed a taste for wine.

Whee... long time no blog.

I have been writing, though, and while my progress on most things has been slower than I would have preferred, I am making some good progress on a variety of things in the Ulan universe. (Jessamine, The Lion And The Lizard, Incarnadine, White In The Moon, and now Nrima and the Ten Good Things.) The problem is, the more I work in this universe the more I realize that its plots tend toward the epic. Jessamine, for example, I'e been resolutely cutting down and cutting down and has finally reached the point where I've gotten it to 7,000 words... and I'm realizing that its plot and character development demand a much longer story. Something along the lines of 20,000. Which, while I'm sure isn't unpublishable, does tend to make things difficult.

So, assuming that you have a variety of stories, none of which are quite children's or young-adults' stories (but of which none are necessarily adult-only), most of which seem to be heading toward that awkward ten-to-twenty-k-words mark, all of which are set in or around the same city... what do you do? Publish a collection of related stories or a chronicle of the city as a novel? Sand them down as much as is possible and try to submit to magazines? Try to find a story that would work as a novel, work on that, and then work on the horter ones as adjuncts to that?

Questions, questions.