Entry deadline: May 15, 2010
Prize announcement: July 15, 2010
Prize amount: $500
Entries per person: One
Length and form: 8,000 words and up, and suitable for serial publication.
“What the heck is a novella, anyway?” Length is obviously the main criterion, i.e. the thing should be longer than a short story, and not so long as a novel. But these are conventions, rather than anything inherent to the fiction object itself. So, wanting to go further, one could argue—as have certain critics, whose names we wish we remembered—that a novella, in order not to be a novel, should focus on one story and one set of characters, not spending appreciable time on others, of either. In order not to be a “mere” short story, it should go into more depth, about both. Is that a satisfying definition, combined with the traditional one, i.e. taking length into account? Hope so. It’ll do for us.
Send only the first 5,000 words of your novella to “novella AT failbetter DOT com.” Paste the lot into the body of the email, or attach it in an .rtf or .txt file. All attached files of any other format will be automatically deleted by our server. We’ll let you know if we’d like to read the rest.
Note that we won’t considered anything that’s been published, either in print or on the Web. We’ll run the winning novella as a serial, starting around about our tenth anniversary, in September 2010.
(More information HERE.)
Prize announcement: July 15, 2010
Prize amount: $500
Entries per person: One
Length and form: 8,000 words and up, and suitable for serial publication.
“What the heck is a novella, anyway?” Length is obviously the main criterion, i.e. the thing should be longer than a short story, and not so long as a novel. But these are conventions, rather than anything inherent to the fiction object itself. So, wanting to go further, one could argue—as have certain critics, whose names we wish we remembered—that a novella, in order not to be a novel, should focus on one story and one set of characters, not spending appreciable time on others, of either. In order not to be a “mere” short story, it should go into more depth, about both. Is that a satisfying definition, combined with the traditional one, i.e. taking length into account? Hope so. It’ll do for us.
Send only the first 5,000 words of your novella to “novella AT failbetter DOT com.” Paste the lot into the body of the email, or attach it in an .rtf or .txt file. All attached files of any other format will be automatically deleted by our server. We’ll let you know if we’d like to read the rest.
Note that we won’t considered anything that’s been published, either in print or on the Web. We’ll run the winning novella as a serial, starting around about our tenth anniversary, in September 2010.
(More information HERE.)
