Letting it grow out

Heavenly crapcakes, 'The Barber' is finally complete - all 16 pages and 8,894 words of it. Talk about your blowouts. I thought it would be a simple little story, maybe 4,000 words at the very most, but it just kept on keeping on. It's turned out to be one of the longest stories I've ever written, at least in terms of page count (it's heavy on dialogue and short sentences).

In novel news ... I might be getting aroused over nothing here, but I was reading a message board devoted to Macmillan's New Writer scheme today and discovered that in a couple of cases, rejections occurred very swiftly - a week, sometimes even days after the submission. (They have had mine a month.) Now, I qualify this by saying that the submissions in question were made back in 2005, when the New Writer imprint was a fledging venture and perhaps not receiving all that many manuscripts. However, it has given me some hope. It's another two weeks before the stated minimum response time (6 weeks) so I'm probably getting well ahead of myself. Nonetheless ... one can dream, can't one? It's all an unsigned writer has.