Thanks for your comment, Hunter.

Dedication, huh? Why do you say that? Just curious.

I've written a lot of books that just aren't mainstream or probably would be too much of a risk to publish as an author's first book, so I'm thinking maybe it's time I just try to write a safe one. That's kinda what I'm doing now. It's going to be short and it's going to be not too ridiculous in any one of the respects that I've previously been ridiculous in (hopefully), but I've accepted that I might have to make a sacrifice in that arena in order to get some of the projects closer to my heart published. In the past it's always been "write something and then find a market for it; don't write FOR a market," but I think I'm not going to get my foot in the door until or unless I try to tailor at least one project to an audience I know is buying. . . .

We'll see.

And you don't have to tell me to keep writing, 'cause there's no way I'd ever quit!

Heh wow. Scary that people can think like that, and imagine that God wants them to spend their lives suffering for His sake. My brain does not want to accept that a good portion of the population feels that they deserve pain, but yeah, it is a reality. . . .

Tom,

Thank you for your lovely comment.

In answer to your specific questions, my long novel was a little over 250,000 words. It's currently entered in the First Chapters contest here at gather. As for the series, no, it is not published. (Not even self-published--which I do not consider a crime but is also not in any way shape or form a goal for me.) The series is very special and important to me, of course, but the first book of it was written more than ten years ago, and while I hold a special place in my heart for it, I do know it is not even close to publishable. Unfortunately, the books later in the series are, if I may say so, really frickin' good! I have to decide where and how to start this series before I can tell those later volumes of it.

As for "what is a story," my belief is that a story is always about people. Too many stories that are boring or just don't work are that way because the author seemed to believe that a story is about THINGS happening to (people), rather than about PEOPLE to whom (things) happen. A character IS a story.

People--characters--move stories. They make things happen, and while an author can choose a setting and a situation, the best stories are always the ones in which the action is moved by the people in it rather than reading like characters reacting to a script. If everything is controlled by the author, nothing about the story can be authentic.

Character-oriented stories of course sometimes start fading into being character sketches rather than plots, but even though the author must come up with (things) to happen to her PEOPLE, a lot of the time the plot is either there before one starts digging (because of where one decided to dig), or it evolves naturally because of the kind of people the characters are.

And that's about all I have to say on the subject for the moment. Thanks again!