The most beautiful sea hasn't been crossed yet.
The most beautiful child hasn't grown up yet.
Our most beautiful days we haven't seen yet.
And the most beautiful words I wanted to tell you

There's always room for improvement, Loz. :)

Totally. Thank you!

Roald Dahl's adult short stories are a lot more interesting overall than his novels, IMO. And they are gorgeous and well worth reading. Just sayin'.

But yeah. Still, a lot of people's longer stuff is chunkily episodic. AND! Your longer pieces have struck me as very promising pushings of the envelope.

Thank you! ♥

Thank the lord for shorter fic writers. It's very, very rare for me to read anything that goes much over 5000, and I adore things in the shorter ranger.

This is a good reminder that I need to start backing myself up on A03 as well. That'll give me most of it here, Dreamwidth and Fanfic.net.

Heh. That's a sweet way of looking at it.

The thing about stories is, they tend to decide their length for themselves. You can't really force it. There's no point in padding out a story just to make it longer for the sake of it, just as there's no point in chopping out good dialogue or narrative purely to make it more compact.

In my eyes, at least, your fics are the perfect length for the stories that they tell. I'd hate to see them stretched or amputated on some Procrustean bed to fit some "should-be" length.

I think that if/when you have an story idea that demands a truly huge number of words to bring into being, it'll happen naturally and organically. In the meantime, not everyone has the skill or sensitivity to craft exquisite short- to mid-length stories that touch the reader in the way that yours do. It's actually very rare, in fact. Please don't beat yourself up for having this gift!

I hate the fact that I think with such a narrow vision, though. I wish I could see the big picture arc, several scenes that string together to encompass a whole --- but it's like --- I totally fail at narrative. And the times I've attempted longer stories the pacing has been up the wazoo and I've skipped important connecting scenes by accident and ugh.

Thank you.