What if, instead of a group losing a person, they gained one? That was the idea that fueled my debut novella, The Extra, but it didn’t become The Extra for many years. First, that idea sat and waited patiently for me to put it together with a backpacking setting inspired by my husband’s real job and a campfire story he told at a party that riveted me, and that’s when I knew it was time to write it.
When I started writing The Extra in 2018, I thought it would be a short story, but the story with a cast of 10/11 that I was telling needed longer than that. I ended up with a little over 22,000 words, which was an awkward length at the time. No one was really publishing novellas back then, and certainly not as a standalone book. I submitted it to *the* big market that was during an open call (probably who you think if you’re in speculative fiction), and they held onto it for over a year (!!). Since they were the only market considering novellas at the time, and they confirmed that I was on the short list, I let them. Ultimately, though, they passed on it in 2019.
I sent it to my agent in 2020 in between novel submissions to see if he had any ideas or thought we could use it. He loved it, but barring expanding it into a novel, which I wasn’t sold on, he didn’t know of anyone taking novellas from debuts, so I set it aside. My submission chart shows that I sent it to one big not-likely-a-fit genre magazine at the end of 2022 and got a form rejection a couple days later. Otherwise, it remained in the story bank.
As far as critique/revisions go, this one stayed very true to form. I took the first good chunk of it into the old critique group for a few weeks in a row, and then I sent the full draft to my three go-to beta readers at the time. I sifted through their feedback and made small-to-medium adjustments. It remained like that until one day, in May 2024, my agent emailed me to ask what I thought about us sending it to an up and coming independent press called Shortwave. He had another client who’d published a novella with them as a standalone and they were seriously impressed with the experience, so I said yeah, why not?
Six days later, I had an enthusiastic offer and a cover design (!) in my email from Alan Lastufka, who runs Shortwave. His cover was brilliant, with the title repeated with doubled letters in the background, camping green, and the chain of figures numbering 11 as in the book. I knew right away that he “got it,” and I followed that instinct and my agent’s advice to accept.
This was all in between novel submissions to the Big 5, which for me has been over a decade, multiple novels, a tedious slog of endless almosts and declined R&Rs and rave rejections. Given the green light to pursue my non-novel books with other presses, I decided I’d earned some joy in just getting my work out there. I haven’t given up on Big 5 yet, but I have been exceedingly lucky in my small press experience. Shortwave (Alan), is truly exceptional. I literally couldn’t invent a better publisher for this novella.
Originally concerned by the short length as a standalone, we brainstormed ways to plump up the pages, which led to the very cool trail map in the beginning and a couple extra thousand words to flesh things out, but ultimately Alan and I both felt the story worked at its length and we shouldn’t force it just for page count. So far, readers have largely praised the slim spine and fast read, enjoying the chance to binge a whole book in a night or two. And after discovering how fantastic it was working with Alan, I ended up pitching two shared-universe follow-ups, The Other and The Spare, which he also accepted, and will come out in the next two years.
How long from initial conception to pub date? Well over 7 years.
How many drafts? About 4
How long were you on submission from first pitch to Shortwave acceptance? Off and on for 6 years
How many rejections did the book receive from any other publishers? 2 (1 personal, 1 form)
How long from the date you submitted to Shortwave to acceptance? 6 days
