Notes - take it or leave it / novella

       Mid-morning. You are feeling somewhat better and you slept better by taking one of your pain pills before bed last night. Another blue sky day with a bit more warm air for accompaniment. You have been considering focusing on your ‘dream’ project first as you realize the other segments are a disguising dressing to your original pre-Merlyn concept, Stuck, which was a trilogy based on the Marsupial humanoids and earthlings. The second book was to be titled Home and the third On Earth. Arrange the ‘Pouch’ segments as one book in three parts and give it a close inspection. You’ll feel better doing so after yesterday’s self-revelation. – Amorella

       1036 hours. Strangely, this morning I don’t feel so enthusiastic about this. They ‘My’ dream idea is rather silly and self-important as well as arrogant.

       This is not so in your delivery system. The tone is one a harsh satire, deep down, similar to that of Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal”. From your perspective of years of thought on the subject, you see Earth as not the right environment for such a grand and somewhat innocent version of building a better world in a place not constructed for such alien thinking. The environment for survival on Earth, as well as human biological and physiological development, do not lend themselves to such ‘parental’ and genetic family guidelines as the Marsupial humanoids have. Your species has too much sense (need?) of ‘individual freedom’ to put up with Marsupial humanoid parental guidance and rules for a lifetime; and in this context you see yourself as a bit of a stranger in a strange land. You have lived with it and as far as you are concerned will continue to do so. Your message is mostly – “Here’s my two cents on the broader basic human condition, take it or leave it.” Post. – Amorella

       1138 hours. I waited until after my forty minutes of exercises, limit in speed today. My spine/back feels better though, than before the exercises. I agree with your above assessment.

       ‘Take it or leave it,’ that’s my assessment too, boy. - Amorella

       A stop at Kroger’s on Tylersville after a late lunch at Smashburgers, and it is a beautiful cloudless day in April. You spent some time finishing Dead Eleven though there is a little cleanup to do before putting it and the chapter together. – Amorella

       1438 hours. I am going to put the ‘Stuck’ and ‘Home’ segments together with a ‘Working Title’ at present. It will be interesting to read as one unit.

       The work you have done, condensing the published Merlyn, works in your favor. Work as you smell the favor of the segments. Even if you finish the second and third book segments of “Diplomatic Pouch” that will be done and you’ll just have to work on the other segments as catch up. – Amorella

       1649 hours. I took an average and the short novel Stuck Home On Earth will be about 40,000 words.  According to Writer’s Digest this is way too short for an adult novel. I did find the following:

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List of novellas

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is a selected list of novellas that have gained fame and/or critical and public acclaim. The generally accepted length of a novella is 20,000 to 40,000 words, differing from a short story (1,000-7,500 words), a novelette (7,500-20,000 words) and a novel (above 40,000 words).

[Selected] List of notable novellas

•                The Alienist (1882) Machado de Assisi

•                Anthem (1938) Ayn Rand

•                The Aspern Papers (1888) Henry James

•                The Awakening (1899) Kate Chopin

•                The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951) Carson McCullers

•                The Barracks Thief (1984) Tobias Wolff

•                The Bear (1941) William Faulkner

•                The Beast in the Jungle (1903) Henry James

•                Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) Herman Melville

•                Benito Cereno (1855) Herman Melville

•                The Bicentennial Man (1976) Isaac Asimov

•                Billy Budd (1892; first published in 1924) Herman Melville

•                The Body (1982) Stephen King

•                Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) Truman Capote

•                Cascade Point (1983) Timothy Zahn

•                The Children's Bach (1984) Helen Garner

•                A Christmas Carol (1843) Charles Dickens

•                Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) Gabriel García Márquez

•                A Clockwork Orange (1962) Anthony Burgess

•                Coraline (2002) Neil Gaiman

•                The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) Thomas Pynchon

•                Daisy Miller (1878) Henry James

•                The Dead (1914) James Joyce, which concludes Dubliners

•                Death in Venice (1913) Thomas Mann

•                The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) Leo Tolstoy

•                The Metamorphosis (1915) Franz Kafka

•                Debt of Bones (2001) Terry Goodkind

•                The Double (1866) Fyodor Dostoyevsky

•                Ethan Frome (1911) Edith Wharton

•                Everyman (2006) Philip Roth

•                First Love (1860) Ivan Turgenev

•                Fly Away Peter (1982) David Malouf

•                The Golden Pot (1814) E. T. A. Hoffmann

•                Goodbye, Columbus (1959) Philip Roth

•                The Hellbound Heart (1984) Clive Barker

•                Heart of Darkness (1902) Joseph Conrad

•                The House on Mango Street (1984) Sandra Cisneros

•                I Am Legend (1954) Richard Matheson

•                In the Ravine (1900) Anton Chekhov

•                Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970) Richard Bach

•                Klein and Wagner (1920) Hermann Hesse

•                Leaf Storm (1955) Gabriel García Márquez

•                Legends of the Fall (1977) Jim Harrison

•                The Lifted Veil (1859) George Eliot

•                The Little Prince (1943) Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

•                The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1974) Heinrich Böll

•                Magic, Inc. (1940) Robert A. Heinlein

•                Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) Stephen Crane

•                Mario and the Magician (1930) Thomas Mann

•                Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004) Gabriel García Márquez

•                Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) Nathanael West

•                My Mortal Enemy (1926) Willa Cather

•                The Mist (1980) Stephen King

•                The Newspaper of Claremont Street (1981) Elizabeth Jolley

•                No One Writes to the Colonel (1961) Gabriel García Márquez

•                Of Mice and Men (1937) John Steinbeck

•                On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks (1989) Joe R. Lansdale

•                Pafko at the Wall (1997) Don DeLillo

•                Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) Katherine Anne Porter

•                Pedro Paramo (1955) Juan Rulfo

•                The Pearl (1945) John Steinbeck

•                The Prague Orgy (1985) Philip Roth

•                The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1962) Muriel Spark

•                A River Runs Through It (1976) Norman Maclean

•                Reunion (1960) Fred Uhlman

•                Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (1982) Stephen King

•                Sailing to Byzantium (1984) Robert Silverberg

•                St Mawr (1925) D.H. Lawrence

•                Seize the Day (1956) Saul Bellow

•                Senso (1874) Camillo Boito

•                The Royal Game ("Schachnovelle" in German; novella written in 1938-41, published posthumously 1942) Stefan Zweig

•                The Shadow Line (1917) Joseph Conrad

•                The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1931) H. P. Lovecraft

•                Shopgirl (2001) Steve Martin

•                Shoplifting from American Apparel (2007) Tao Lin

•                The Snow Goose (1940) Paul Gallico

•                The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) Robert Louis Stevenson

•                The Stranger (1942) Albert Camus

•                The Tenth Man (1985) Graham Greene

•                The Turn of the Screw (1898) Henry James

•                The Two Deaths of Quincas Wateryell (1959) Jorge Amado

•                The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag (1942) Robert A. Heinlein

•                Ward Number Six (1892) Anton Chekhov

•                The War of the Worlds (1898) H.G. Wells

•                The Woman Who Waited (2006) Andrei Makine

•                The Willows (1907) Algernon Blackwood

•                The Cubs (1980) Mario Vargas Llosa

•                Aura (1962) Carlos Fuentes

•                The Kingdom of this World (1949) Alejo Carpentier

•                Arup Tomar Entokanta (2007) Malay Roy Choudhury

•                And Venus is Blue (1986) Mary Hood

                 Quest for Pandaria (2012) Sarah Pine

Selected and edited from Wikipedia

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       2207 hours. Late in the afternoon I copied the above from Wikipedia. With the book list I can see it is possible to put all the re-drafted segments of Diplomatic Pouch into a novella without any problem. What irony, all those words down to the important ones in the ‘dream’. It was not a dream or a vision either, it is a story encountered within myself I must have induced it subconsciously. I need to know what the dream was not what it means. I don’t care what it means or doesn’t mean, I just want a fully account of the human encounter with marsupial humanoids who have a civilization in my head that is 20,000 years older than our present. I want to fill it in. Then I will be satisfied and I will be able to say, “This is my story, my novella, my fiction.” These are my present thoughts on the subject.

      Post. - Amorella