When My Brain Won't Let Me Not Write Of Something

So my brain won't let me get away without writing something about this.

This? Let me first say that Hugh Howey and company's SPSFC awards effort is, I believe, a good thing. Celebrating indie writers *cough* is unambiguously good.

That said: the Science Fiction Writers of America (and others) have long held that a novel weighs in at 40,000 words.

The SPSFC awards weight a novel at 50,000 words. You will immediately spot the problem: there will come a day where the SFWA awards a Nebula for best SF novel of the year to a 40,000 word indie-written novel, and it won't even be eligible under the SPSFC rules.

This is, as they say, an own-goal on the SPSFC's part.

But I'm not really much interested in the SPSFC's categories. Their award, they get to do with it what they will.

I care about the indie writers that are going to be caught by this.

Look: if you want to add 10,000 words worth of padding to make it fit the SPSFC's novel category, for money and fame? Please go ahead. You're in good company, Dickens and Hugo pioneered this art long long ago. And the authors of the 1970's did the same thing when their editors started demanding longer and longer works (that just happened to cut the per-word rate they were paying, huh how's that work?) to fill out the racks.

What if your story is what it is, though, and you're beating yourself over the head as to what to do?

Ignore it. Use the link to the Nebulas category liberally and move on down the road. 40,000's an industry standard, you're cool.

Oh, and your/our company here in this peculiar liminal space of labels? Doyle and McCaffrey and Moorcock and Zelazny and Orwell and Chesterton and Lewis and Stevenson and Moore and Kurtz and Conrad and....