Thankyou for all the responders and the discussion. This is actually quite a departure from what I expected to find... I guess I hear some writers saying "130K pages max" so often, it had started to sink in.
It's not that longer stories don't get written, but when I speak to those authors they all seem to feel that long stories are a problem. I wonder if it's related more to the publisher reticence to publish longer stories from new writers that is behind it?
I'd hate to think of anyone writing a story and aiming at a specific length. I agree that a story is finished when it is finished. For a long time, I was quite worried about my own story being about 20% over "optimum".
I never really stopped to fully consider some of the arguments you've put forward for simply writing the story to the length it needs to be written to.
But it is good to hear -
Though with talk of pages, it does make me wonder... I would have thought pages were somewhat obsolete in the e-reader world. I take it I'm wrong there and that people still think in terms of pages, even with an e story?
Regards,
David