19.17: Novellas- the Goldilocks of Publishing
How do you find the right size for your story? And speaking of size, what do novellas do differently than both short stories and novels? What even is the difference between a novel and a novella? How many characters do they usually have? How many subplots? How do you know if your story should take the form of a novella or a novel? We dive into all these questions (and…you guessed it… more!) in our conversation.
A note on the structure of Season 19: in between our close reading series (six episodes where we dive into an element of craft through a close reading of a specific text), we’ll be doing two wild card episodes! These episodes are random topics that our hosts have been wanting to tell you about, we just didn’t know where they fit. So we MADE a place for them to fit!
Thing of the Week:
Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall (a collaborative, storytelling-based RPG)
Homework:
Take a short story that you either love or have written and write a list of things that could be added to expand it to novella length. Now do the same for a novel, but make it a list of things that might need to be cut.
A Reminder!
That starting May 12th, we’ll be focusing on Worldbuilding and reading A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. If you’re going to buy this book, we have this bookshop link available for you to do so! (If not, go support your local library!) https://bookshop.org/lists/close-readings-season-19
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar, Mary Robinette Kowal, and DongWon Song. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
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Transcript
Key points: Novella, short story, or novel? Novellas let you go deeper into worldbuilding, take some sidetrips that you can’t fit into a short story. Without having to sustain the idea for a whole novel. Novellas, 8 to 10 scenes, 2 to 3 characters. Layer cakes! Short stories are a sheet cake, novels are mille-feuille, and novellas are wedding cakes, just a few layers. One main narrative thrust, a handful of characters. At most, a couple of POVs. Characters, scenic locations, and timeline, especially try-fail cycles. Novels are like a series, with plenty of information. Novellas are movie-sized little snacks. Often, novellas have chapters. Short stories are meant to be read in one sitting, novellas take longer, and novels take a long time. Short stories and novellas often play with form, they are more experimental. Novels are about immersion, short stories are about emotional punch. Novellas are short stories told with novel pacing. One long beautiful mood. Or in terms of running errands, short stories are a quick trip to get a stick of butter. Novellas give you the freedom to do some side quests, maybe a little more shopping. Novels, of course, are tours of the city.
[Season 19, Episode 17]
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
[Mary Robinette] Hey, listeners. We want your input on season 20. Which, I have to be honest, does not sound like a real number. What elements of the craft do you want us to talk about? What episode or core concept do you use or reference or recommend the most? Or, what are you just having trouble with? After 20 seasons, we’ve talked about a lot of things. What element of writing do you wish we’d revisit for a deeper dive on the podcast? Email your ideas to podcast@writingexcuses.com
[Season 19, Episode 17]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Novellas the Goldilocks of Publishing.
[Erin] I’m Erin.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] And I’m DongWon.
[Erin] I wanted to talk a little bit in this wildcard about novellas, because I feel like as I was coming up in the publishing industry, in spec fic, novellas went from, like, a thing that occasionally showed up in a magazine like Asimov’s or Analog to a huge category with actual books that you can buy on the shelves. I wanted to understand a little bit more about, like, when you know something should be a novella versus a short story or a novel?
[Mary Robinette] It’s a… For me, one of the things that is interesting about it is the… That it reflects the kind of fashion of writing, because some of the books that I loved most were incredibly short books. So I feel like, for me, what a novella does is that it allows me to go a little bit deeper and more immersive in my world building, take some of the sidetrips that I want to take but I don’t have space for in a short story. But I don’t have to sustain an idea over an entire novel. That there’s this sweet spot where it’s got enough other things happening in it that you want to explore, but, also, you don’t want to live there for 120,000 words.
[Erin] That make sense. I’ll be honest. I, at one point, studied a bunch. Like, I took a few novellas to try to figure out what was inside of them.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I did literary surgery on them. What I found was that they’re usually, like, in the ones I’d seen, like 8 to 10 scenes, total, and, like, 2 to 3 characters. So I don’t know if, like, that’s… If what you… And, like, not really any subplots. It was usually, like, we’re going to follow these 2 to 3 characters on one particular journey over 8 or 9 scenes, and then we’re going to kind of wrap. But I’m curious if, like, you found when you were writing the novella, Mary Robinette, or in the ones that you’ve seen or read in the industry, is that true or were these just the ones that I found?
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think about it in terms of layer cakes, is the metaphor I always go back to. Where, like, a short story is kind of like a sheet cake. Right? A novel, like a mille-feuille, where there’s like a million different layers of like characters and subplots and all of these things. A novella, as the name would imply, falls somewhere in between, where you… It’s like a wedding cake. You’ve got a few tiers, just a few layers in here, but it’s not so dense that you require the full length of a novel to sort of get that through. There’s usually one main narrative thrust, maybe a B plot, maybe a C plot if you’re really stretching it. A handful of characters, right? 2, 3, whatever it is. Certainly not more than a couple POVs. I mean, obviously, all these rules can be broken, as with anything we talk about, but generally, when I am looking at a pitch, or a writer comes to me and they’re like, “Hey, I’d like to tell this story.” Sometimes, I’ll be like this feels a little bit more like a novella. I think you need to complicate this, add other POVs, if we want to punch it up to a novel. Or sometimes somebody will come to me with a novel pitch and I’ll be like I don’t know about this C plot, I don’t know about this thing over here, what if we cut that out and make it a novella? And it’ll be a leaner, meaner version of this story. So, for me, a lot of times, I am like kind of looking at where it fits in that way, and those… What you’re talking about are exactly the levers I’m pulling on in terms of how many POVs, how many plots, those kinds of things.
[Mary Robinette] So, I have this formula that I’ve talked about on the podcast before that I use as a diagnostic tool sometimes when I’m trying to figure out, like, how to… When I was trying to figure out how to do this. Which is looking at the number of characters and the scenic locations. I think that one of the things that I don’t account for in that, but that is one of the pieces that tips it from being short story to this novella is the… Is not just the number of characters and locations, because you’re right, you can have a novella that’s… Like This Is How You Lose the Time War, it’s like 2 characters, it’s a ton of locations.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Mary Robinette] But I think one of the things that a novella has is that there’s often a longer timeline than there is in a short story. Not always. Because you can have a short story that can span decades, it’s just harder to do. But that it is reflected in kind of the number of try-fail cycles. So I think of it, again, in the embellishments, the flourishes, that there’s just more nuance to a novella then sometimes you can have in a short story. Where you have to be so constrained, and you can’t have anything extra there. But you can have some extra bits in there that just… That are the decorative flourish on the icing.
[DongWon] I’m going to flip it a little bit from one way I sometimes talk about it. If you think about… So, when we’re selling movie rights, right, or selling film and TV rights, a lot of times when it’s a full novel, we’ll be like, “This feels more like a series. There’s too much information here to fit into a movie.” Where is a novella’s kind of like a perfectly movie-sized little snack. You know what I mean? Because when you’re watching a film, you really only have a couple hours to get that across. So the kind of amount of character and content you have in a film is about the right size for what you want in a novella. Right? So if you think about the difference between Blade Runner, the movie, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the novel, there’s a radically different amount of information and content in these 2 stories. One is much more laser focused on one major plot line. Right? So you can kind of like… That’s one way to think about it. We often like to compare things to movies and TV shows on this podcast, so it’s funny to like invert it a little bit, of, like, would this make a good movie? Then maybe it’s more novella-sized.
[Erin] I love the way that you’re thinking about that, because when you started out talking, I thought you were going to say that a novella felt like an episode of a series to you, because I always think more in television than movies. I was like it kind of does feel like… Like, I’m thinking about an episode of Star Trek, like an episode where a lot is happening. Whereas a short story is… Almost could just be the climactic scene in an episode that has like… It pulls in just enough that you understand who the people are, but it doesn’t necessarily have, like, that part in an episode of a TV show where they just kind of like do their walk and talk, from, like, the West Wing days, where they kind of catch up a little bit on things that are slightly extraneous to what the story moment is, but it helps to build out the world of the character a little bit more.
[DongWon] When we sell short story rights, it is often, like, we have half of a movie or that pilot episode of a TV show. Then, we gotta do a lot of extrapolation past that. The question we are always answering when somebody is like, we want to acquire the rights to that story, is, how do we expand this? Right? Versus, when we’re selling a novel, it’s how do we get this to fit into the container that we’re trying to put it in? Right? So, that’s, in part, just because this is a conversation I have a lot, how I think about it, but we all have a lot of familiarity with those forms, so that might be helpful.
[Mary Robinette] As we’re talking, I’m thinking about another piece that goes into a novella that does not go into a short story. Which is that often, novellas have chapters.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] That there is a… There’s a function that chapters have, which is to provide a larger break. So a novella has scenes, short stories can have multiple scenes. But you don’t see a short story that has, like, a chapter break. Those represent, for me, a pacing thing.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Mary Robinette] That it’s one of the ways you can control pacing, by saying, okay, we’re going to do a real hard line under this important point. We’re going to give you a breather. Then we’re going to move on. In thinking that through as we’re talking, I think that part of what the novella has over the short story is room to breathe.
[DongWon] Yep. A short story’s meant to be read in one sitting, by and large. You sit down, you read the story. If you leave halfway through the story, you’re probably not coming back to it. It feels like something went wrong there. Right? Versus a novella… What’s nice is, you’re meant to read it over a weekend, over a couple of days, over the course of the week, versus a novel which will take you weeks to months, depending on how fast you read. Right? Yes. I know some people read novels in weekends or in a night. But in general, your thinking about the reading experience. How long do you want people to sit in this world? How long are you expecting them to remember stuff? Right? Something like This Is How You Lose the Time War, it’s a very dense story, so… But there’s more… You can rely on the reader to remember more, because they read it more recently, than if that were a 150,000 word novel.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I also, the idea of reading that as a 150,000 word novel, I don’t think it’s sustainable.
[DongWon] Oh, I get tired just thinking about that.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Yeah, because form… Like, one of the things that short stories can do as well is play with form.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] I feel like novellas still fall into that. Where you can do something that you might not want to do forever.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] But it’s just long enough to be, like, okay. I’m okay with looking for a different format or a different type of voice…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Then I would in a long term novel series.
[DongWon] That’s another thing I tell people when they’re like I’m thinking about this idea, and sometimes I’ll say, maybe this works better as a novella if it is high formalist. Right? If it is experimental in some way. Like, that might overstay its welcome at 200, 300, or 400 pages, but if you stay under 200 pages or if it’s under 40,000 words, then you can get away with being a lot weirder, a lot more experimental, playing with voice a lot more. When I think on some of my favorite novella reading experiences, they’re ones that have been pretty buck wild as a reading experience. Right? Like Kai Ashante Wilson, Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, is written in this hugely elevated tone. Right? That would be so hard to sustain at a greater length, but at that size, I was like, this is delicious. I’m rolling around this, having a great time. [Bobo Landers] is kind of like that, too. The voice of their novella is hard to sustain over that length, but in a small bite-sized capsule, it is so delicious.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You were making me think about Fonda Lee’s The Untethered Sky, which is very… It is both epic and very quiet. It’s someone who’s a falconer, and it would not work as a novel. Even though it is dealing with vast distances, big empire stuff, all sorts of cool things. But it’s so intimate and so personal, and that’s the reason that you’re reading it, that if you tried to do it at a longer length, it would become a totally different book, because you would have to put in these really big steak moments in order to keep the tension, in order to keep escalating.
[Erin] Speaking of escalation, we will do that when we get back from the break.
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[DongWon] This week our thing of the week is a role-playing game called Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall. This is a role-playing game about Chinese immigrant families in the US or Canada who run restaurants and get attacked by vampires. Very specific, but that is what makes it so interesting. It has an incredibly strong focus on family dynamics and on the process of blending in or trying to fit into a culture that is not originally your own. Role-playing games are most interesting to me when their mechanics directly address the story and incentivize a certain kind of storytelling. Jiangshi does this beautifully. For example, instead of having stats like strength and constitution and intelligence and stuff, you’ve got stats for how well you can speak Chinese, how well you can write Chinese, I will you can speak English and write English, and all of these different things really help sell the idea that you are in a culture or even in a family that you don’t entirely understand, because you come from very different backgrounds. It’s an incredibly fun game. Has really great horror elements. Again, that’s called Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall.
[Erin] All right. We are back. I’m going to escalate by getting down to brass tacks. Which is, on a mercenary level, like, in terms of the publishing industry, our novellas something that we should be aiming for? Can we all get rich this way?
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Novellas, yes or no?
[Mary Robinette] Yes, obviously, we can [garbled]
[DongWon] Obviously. Publishing, in general, great way to get rich. Novellas is such an interesting thing. Because they’ve been a category forever, and I’ve always loved reading them. It’s one of my favorite formats. But as a traditional big 5 publishing option, that is new. Right? We’re talking in the last 5, 10 years, they have really risen as this thing, primarily because of Tor.com. Right? So Tor.com is a sub imprint of the Tor publishing group. It’s connected to Tor, the main imprint, but it’s a… It’s its own little thing. Right? With its own editorial team, whatever. It grew out of the Tor.com website. Sorry, this is too much history. But… They started a publishing program, and I think to distinguish themselves from what Tor prime was publishing, they… And because they’d done short fiction on the website for so long, they started with shorter works, with novellas. They were being very experimental in how they were produced, how they were printed, and how they were sold. They were experimenting on lots of differences with the Tor.com imprint. That has eventually settled down to a more traditional model. They’re now printing books the same way everyone else does, and they’re doing the contracts the same way everyone else does. But the end result was, they published a ton of novellas very quickly that were all from authors who weren’t traditionally getting published in other avenues, and were publishing a lot of very experimental fiction. There’s a lot of weird stuff in there. Both books I just mentioned before the break are Tor.com novellas. Right? [Neon Young’s Blackguards of Heaven] is also like a very experimental queer novel or novella that is also published in that category. Right? So it was just carving out this exciting little space where some authors got to build really successful careers. Right? Martha Wells is a great example of somebody who had a long career publishing, but hadn’t quite hit the mainstream success. Then, with the Murderbot Diaries, those novellas, just launched her to a completely different level in terms of where she’s at in terms of publishing. So. Novellas became viable. That said, only really Tor.com does novellas. Most of the other major imprints don’t intend to take them on. It’s a little weird in terms of how you place them and how you sell them, and then they just weren’t used the doing shorter fiction, especially in genre fiction. So when we pitched This Is How You Lose the Time War, we were pitching to a lot of publishers, and it was a little bit of a struggle with most of them who couldn’t really imagine doing something that short. Right? So, obviously, there are things that have worked very, very well in the novella space, done enormously… Have sold a lot of copies, and been very commercially successful. But that is still viewed as a fairly difficult thing to pull off. So. The short answer is I wouldn’t advise going into it to get rich. However, there’s a cool opportunity of a very innovative publisher who’s willing to take on novellas that may not get a shot in other venues.
[Mary Robinette] I find… One of the things as you were talking, like, that I find interesting is that there’s kind of 2 different modes that you can sell a novella in. You can either sell it in this thing where it is considered a standalone book and you have a book publishing contract. Then you can sell it as a short story which you don’t get royalties on and it’s just a per word rate. They are such different landscapes for, also, not only the monetary income, but also the longevity of the piece.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Mary Robinette] If you publish something in Asimov’s or any of the magazines that take novellas, it goes out and then it fades away. It vanishes as the next thing comes out. But something that is published in book form, it will stay on shelves, often.
[Erin] It’s an interesting trade-off, though. I have a welcome debate with friends about sort of where’s your sort of ideal novella market? Because on the one hand, yes, it fades if it goes out in sort of a traditional magazine. On the other hand, you get the eyeballs of all the people who read that magazine, like, free of charge. Whereas if you do it as a book, and you know Tor.com has a great marketing arm, but if you do it through, like, a smaller… There are other smaller presses that do novellas as well, like, [Neon Hemlock]
[DongWon] Yeah. I was going to say [Neon Hemlock], Tachyon.
[Erin] Tachyon. Like maybe it catches fire and maybe it doesn’t. So it lasts forever, hopefully, but, like, you don’t really know if you’ll find your audience.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Also, the rights will get locked… Tied down, when you go with the book publishing mode. That you… Because they stay there. Whereas I can… Anything that I published in short story mode, I can send out for reprints. I have complete control over foreign rights. It’s like there’s negotiation that happens in other things.
[DongWon] One thing to think about strategically when you’re considering publishing in novella with a traditional publisher, like Tor.com, is to remember that you’re publishing a book. Right? We like to talk about novellas with their own little category, but at the end of the day, you’re publishing a book, and that book is competing with every other book that’s getting published, including Brandon Sanderson 200,000 word epics and literary fiction and [Reese] book club picks. Right? You’re going on the shelf with all those things. Right? You’re not in a separate space where people are showing up to look for shorter content, like you would be at a short fiction magazine. Right? So, a lot of the effort that goes into launching a novella is the same that you would be doing as if you were a debut novelist. Right? There’s a little bit of, like, an asterisk if you’re publishing a novella in terms of when people are looking at your sales track, if you publish a novella that doesn’t blow the doors off. You’re not going to be as penalized when you’re trying to sell a full-length novel as you would be as if you’d published a debut novel that didn’t do great. But that’s like marginal. So, I would encourage people to really think of, like, do I want to write a novella? Do I want to write a novel? If you’re making that straight choice in terms of a publishing strategy, the math gets pretty complicated.
[Mary Robinette] I want to also flag that we’re talking about these in terms of traditional publishing modes.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] When you’re looking at Indie publishing… I think that’s one of the other reasons that novellas started to take off, is that we were seeing Indie publishers who were putting out extremely short novels, but were… By the award categories, technically, novellas. But they were putting out these extremely short novels that people were excited about.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] Because you can get in, you can experiment, you can have this tasty snack, and then move on to the next thing. Being shorter means you can turn out more of them. Which then every time you publish a new book, makes your backlist come alive. So there’s a lot of reasons to pursue learning to write in this Goldilocks zone.
[Erin] Yeah. I also think there’s a little more… This could just… This could be wrong, don’t come for me, publishing, but I do think there is a little more risk-taking sometimes in the, like, small press novella world.
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Erin] Where folks who are doing something experimental, or maybe coming from like a mar… They’re doing something different with language or structure that isn’t what people are use to are being given a shot, and then maybe that helps them to get the book contracts. I’ve seen several people who I’m like, Oo, I love that person. I saw their novella 2 years ago, and now I’m seeing their novel. Maybe they would have done that anyway, but I think it also builds up a little bit of your own courage.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Erin] Plus, if your granny is asking you, “Did you write a book? Where can I find it?” And you publish a novella in book form, you can just hand it to her at your next holiday party.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Honestly, that’s worth a little bit of something.
[DongWon] No, it’s worth a lot.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] A lot of my clients are people who started out as novella writers, who then… We were able to turn around and sell a novel. In most cases, it was a lot easier to sell that novel because we could be like, “Hey. This novella one awards. It sold really well. XYZ.” Right? Like, people love it, we got blurbs from so-and-so. Right? That does make it easier to sell a novel. Right? I’m not saying it’s always a steppingstone, but I’ve been very lucky with that in my career of being able to turn, whether it’s [garbled C3 you know] or [Neon Yawn] or somebody like that, who had a successful novella and then being able to turn that around and go to a publisher and say, “Hey. We have a debut novel. Here’s what it is,” and they’re like, “Hey, we’re very excited to do this.”
[Erin] I mean, ultimately, like, you can’t force yourself just for… Much as I like to talk about the monies, like, you can’t force yourself or your idea into a form that it’s not. But it is something to think about. Like, especially if you’re on the edge. Like, you’re on the very edge. Like, this is just between maybe novella and short story, I would say. I think it’s harder to be, maybe, just between novella and novel. Because, like…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] I think there is a big leap in the amount of depth in the amount of content.
[DongWon] Totally.
[Erin] Something I was wondering earlier is, I know, Mary Robinette, you’ve said that, like, novels are really about immersion. Right? And short stories are about something that’s not immersion.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] It’s emotional punch is the way I…
[Erin] Emotional punch.
[Mary Robinette]… Way to describe it. But, yeah.
[Erin] Great. Thank you. I couldn’t remember. What would you say, do you have something, like, for novellas that has that same… Putting you on the spot for the pithy…
[Mary Robinette] My pithy… A novella is a short story told with novel pacing.
[Erin] Oo. All right.
[Mary Robinette] It’s… I think it really is the combination of the 2. It is… There’s a clarity to a novella in terms of the emotional journey that it’s going to deliver for you. That there’s generally, not always, but frequently, like, one long beautiful mood that’s being built. Whereas novels, you have to hit a bunch of different things, otherwise you get kind of taste saturation. You don’t have to worry about that with a novella, because you’re in there for less time. But it does give you a chance to flirt with the immersion. So one of the ways I often describe writing as like a roadmap that you’re driving someplace, and then there’s these side quests. If you’re just… If you’re running a quick errand, you just… You’re going to the store, you’re going to get the stick of butter, you’re going to come back home. Every time you add a task to that, you’re there longer. So when you’re doing the short story, you’re like I cannot do any other tasks. I just have to get the stick of butter and get out. Because otherwise I’m going to burn everything that’s at home. With the novella, you’ve got the freedom to do the side quests. You’ve got the freedom to do the impulse buy and still go and do the journey and then come home. That, to me, is, like, one of the things about a novella.
[Erin] I love this. Like, I’m thinking about this, like, short story get the butter, the wander the grocery store in the novella… Maybe you run into a neighbor, but you’re still in the grocery store. Then, in the novel, it like zooms out in the grocery store is just like…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] A part of a large…
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] City worth of things that you’re actually going to be focusing on.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] One last thing… I know we’re running a little long, but one more thing I want to add on the publishing side is, I’m calling a little bit of a shot, but I’ve been seeing a trend over time of novels getting shorter. There’s been more pressure from publishers to want shorter books. I think we’re going to see this distinction between novella and novel breaking down on the publishing side, and people just say it’s a book. This one short, that one’s long. I think we’re starting to see that more and more of publishers being interested and willing to publish things that are shorter and shorter. Things around 60,000 words and under has been very common in the literary fiction for a long time. So I’m seeing that trend even lower as we see people with an appetite for quick reads, slimmer books, things like that.
[Mary Robinette] So, I think you are absolutely right. This gets back to what I was talking about right at the beginning about fashion. Fahrenheit 451, we all agree this is a novel. Right? It is 46,000 words. That’s a novella.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That’s, like, by modern standards, that is a novella. It has tipped just over…
[DongWon] Just over the line, but yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Just over the line for award categories. But when you think about a lot of those golden age books…
[DongWon] They’re short.
[Mary Robinette] They’re really short. I think it’s because… I think one of the things for the ones… Especially the ones that have stuck around, I think one of the reasons is because they’re short. Because they’re novella length. It’s this opportunity to play.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Erin] All right. Let’s give you an opportunity to play with some homework. So, take a short story that you either love or that you’ve written, and just make a list of things that you might add if you were going to turn it into a novella. Then, do the same for a novel that you either written or love, and what is the list of things that you might have to take out if you wanted to make it into a novella.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.
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