The Lexicographer's Rules

After seeing the link to Cory Doctorow’s novella, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, about a gagillion trillion times, and reading him talk about it even more (who isn’t their own best spokesperson and PR rep?) I finally downloaded it and read it. It’s good. At about an hour’s read, it’s a rich, intriguing sci-fi melodrama, with a thousand openings for elaboration on Cory’s invented society and the humans Mark II which inhabit it. But some of the implications of Cory’s near-future are bothersome. I’ve been swatting them away for several days, the way you do movie plot holes and insults from people you have a crush on, but those spiny implications are now so far under the riding blanket, I’ve got to rest this horse. Ha. So, in an attempt to work through those niggling details, I’ve written The Lost Chapter from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, in which I’ve extended some of the themes into what I consider logical exaggerations, working vaguely within the rough parameters laid out in Cory’s Bitchun world.

Cory writes, “It’s a novel. Novella == 15,000 - 40,000 words (word count == manuscript pages * 250, to equalize for short dialog-centric grafs). D&OITMK;==240 MS pages, 60,000 words, novel.” I know there’s a lot of room for a definition of novella, so I used my own: anything that takes longer than 10 minutes but less than an hour to read is a novella. No dictionary I have (I have 18; I do lexicography on the side) has a word-length as part of its definition of novella, usually defining it similar to WordNet as something akin to a short novel. Of course, the SFWA Nebula rules say a short story is 7499 words or fewer, novelette 7500-17,499, novella 17,500-39,999, novel 40,000 or more. You’ve got 47,606 words or so, so there’s another vote for novel.

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