ANDREW BISS

My new mystery novelette The One-Eyed Guru is finally ready for primetime. I was originally going to label it a short story. However, I've since learned that a work the length of The One-Eyed Guru is technically a novelette. At first I was hesitant to call it that, as I imagined many readers wouldn't be familiar with the term. But I've decided that even if they aren't, anything using the suffix "ette" denotes something that is diminutive, so there shouldn't be a problem. I was also wary of calling it a short story because these can be as short as 1,000 words, and I didn't want someone dismissing looking into the book further if they thought it was really short and not worth spending a buck on. (Guru is around 8,000 words, by the way.) So a novelette it is. A mystery novelette. It should go live on Amazon in the next day or two. Sales for The End of the World have been picking up lately, so I'm hoping that if The One-Eyed Guru does well, it'll ...

Well, soon-ish. The end is finally in sight for the completion of my short story The One-Eyed Guru. To be honest, it's been a lot more work than I imagined when I began it, but I think it will have all paid off in the end. Talking of ends, I'm now just tweaking and toying with the ending. As always, endings are so critical. Someone can read something you've written and thoroughly enjoy it all the way to the last few pages, but if you blow the denouement then they walk away less than satisfied. On a separate and entirely unrelated note, I was horrified to learn yesterday of Denmark's plan to ban Marmite - apparently because it's fortified with added vitamins! Who doesn't love added vitamins? I can't get enough of them to help prop up my generally poor intake of all that's good for me. And if you're not familiar with Marmite, it's a yeast extract spread that people tend to either love or hate, but if you love it, having some spread on hot buttered ...

I've decided that my next project will be to adapt my one-act play The One-Eyed Guru into a short story. Generally, my writing tends to fall into one of two camps: a heightened reality/absurdist style or straightforward realism/naturalism. I didn't decide this...it's just how I write. The One-Eyed Guru was, at the time that I wrote it, the most naturalistic play I'd written up until that point, which was still very early in my writing career. I have no idea where the idea for the story came from, but it appeared in my head one day and I wrote it all out. For whatever reason, I never really pushed that play in any marketing sense, though its had several productions and still generates interest from visitors to my website. But I've never really given it the attention that I honestly think it deserves. Part of that is the onset of the "anything longer than 10-Minutes will not be accepted" trend in one-act festivals that has taken place over the past decade. ...