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How long?

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the long drop: open air toilet So how long should a story be? As long as it needs to be is usually the answer I give. When I first started writing them my stories seemed to consistently be 1000-2000 words. Then they got shorter, though I've yet to spend time working a great deal on shorty-shorts or micro-shorts. I think there are a lot better writers than me doing it ( Josephine Rowe , for example) and it kind of reminds me of that intensity of writing poetry, which - except for the occasional stormy effort - I've pretty much left by the wayside. Enter 'The Caretaker' (no no, not the excellent Harold Pinter play). This is a story I started over a year ago as 'Defrag' . Then it became 'In the time of Camels '. ( I love playing with titles). But at over 5000 words, and nowhere near finished, this is a story - I finally conceded today - that is going to be much longer than any other story I've written. And yet I've persisted - until today