An Early Novella in Cross & Circle
Cross and Circle was one of the first long-form pieces I wrote and published. I originally thought it would be a short story, but the word count kept creeping up, and I realized it was actually going to be closer to a novella length (it’s a little shorter than the official SFWA novella lower limit, so it’s technically a novelette).
I’ve talked a little about the inspiration for this story before, along with the research I did to make that inspiration work. In this case, it was primarily into Indigenous peoples and their cultures, which also played into Evie’s academic specialty in comparative religions. But I also had to do a little research into hypnosis for a part of the story, along with miscellaneous other topics.
It sometimes seems odd to me that my contemporary stories involve so much research–you would think that setting things in the real world would be easy! But there’s always some element that I just don’t know enough about, or that I know enough about to have some potentially incorrect understandings. And while I may not get everything correct, I try to get things at least plausible!
So while Cross and Circle was completed early in my writing career, I’m still pretty proud of the work I did to research, write, and edit it into a complete novella/novelette!
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