Damn word counts. Damn 'em to hell. On the one hand I keep thinking 'quality is far more important than quantity. Stop worrying about how many words the story has and just write, you silly bastard'. On the other I have to remember that freelance submissions are paid by the word, and that magazines tend to stipulate that story lengths fall between an upper and lower bound. They must neither be too short nor too long.

At present (as I've said before), I'm working on Goldric's Luck; a short story prequel to the RPG scenario The Tyrant's Festival. I'd set myself a target of 7,000 words. Nothing too heavy. Something you could sit down and read in a lunch break. Sort of appropriate as I've been writing it during my lunch breaks at work. Progress has been slow but satisfactory -- a few hundred words here and there, but the character of Goldric is developing just how I want him to. Problem is I've hardly put down half of what I need to, and I'm already approaching the target word count.

What the hell do I do? Obviously when I get round to redrafting it I can start cutting superfluous words, tightening things up, but that's only part of the solution, isn't it? The thing is, I don't think the plot challenges the reader.

Last time I submitted something -- and it was a while ago now -- I sent a short story called Watercolour to gothic.net. They rejected it, and pointed out a strength and a flaw with the MS. They liked my characterisation (which is always encouraging to hear!) but felt the plot was too predictable, and now I finally see why. I'm just following one character around, not sowing enough seeds of mystery, meandering from beginning to end. My story needs to branch and reconverge. I need more hooks, just so I can hang future plot threads from them. There has to be more. More of everything. While the reader can get to know Goldric pretty well by reading the current draft, it's not worth much without other characters to engage the reader as well. A story happens when several complex, real characters interact. Motives clash or coincide. Narrative seems to be a series of chemical reactions, with personalities as the reagents.

Goldric's Luck needs more characters. I already have a lot to choose from if I go through The Tyrant's Festival again. The more I develop one, the more I'll develop the other, which does the stories a lot of good.

I just wish there was some way of easily cramming this into a nice, self-contained 7,000-word story. Of course, I'm sure we all know it doesn't work like that. Not easily, anyway.