“What Are You Optimistic About?”<\/a> I wasn't feeling all that optimistic that day, but I hoaxingly pushed the ideas from my novel Postsingular<\/i>, and that made me optimistic after all.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/images\/gfamilyxmas.jpg\")
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I’ve been away from the blog because we were in New York City visiting daughter Georgia, son-in-law Courtney and granddaughter Althea. It was lovely to be with them. It's a little hard to believe I'm now the visiting grandparent category! Sliding down the hill…<\/p>\n
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It's so great to see the new ones coming up! Althea's favorite present was a second stuffed penguin, a “big peng” to go with her well-worn “little peng.”<\/p>\n
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When I got home, I got into crunch mode on a short story called “Hormiga Canyon” that I’ve been writing with Bruce Sterling. I think it’s gonna turn out well, and it’s pretty long. According to the official SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America!) categories, it’s not a short story, it’s a novelette<\/i>:<\/p>\n
Short Story — 7,500 words or fewer
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Novelette — 7,500 – 17,500 words
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Novella — 17,500 – 40,000 words
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Novel — 40,000 words or more<\/p>\n
I always laugh over that word “novelette,” reminds me of the old Rowan and Martin Laugh-In<\/i> show and they’d have this foppy, drunk-seeming guy called Big Al pretending to be a newscaster, and he’d introduce some segments of his fake newscast by picking up a little bell and tinkling it and saying, “Featurette!”<\/p>\n
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Our novelette is about giant ants, something I'd always wanted to write about, ever since the movie Them<\/i> and the Blondie song, “The Attack of the Giant Ants.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Happy New Year. In terms of prime factors, 2207 = 3 * 3 * 223. Lots of 2’s and 3’s, which I like. On Sunday, January 7, 2007, I’ll be live on the radio, from 4 PM to 5 PM in the afternoon, on the Billy Sunshine Show out of Sand City, California (near Monterey), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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