Tentative titles and dates for my 16 novellas

As always, I think of the novella 'as a container, not its contents'.

Similar to Edgar Allan Poe, I like best a text (cum book) that you can read in one sitting and which results in one overall impression upon the reader.

So I have stolen the term 'novella' from the literary types, who use it most consistently for fictional work of between roughly 12,500 words and 25,000 words.

In practice, a novella today is usually around 19,000 words long.

(I think most of us regard fiction between 7500 words to about 15,000 words as either a novelette or a long short story, just as we tend to regard fiction over 30,000 words in length as a short novel.)

In terms of work that isn't fully or overtly fictional, like my work, this results a book of between 50 and 120 pages, depending on illustrations and formatting.

I think most of us can read a book like this, if it is clearly written and attractively laid out, in between 75 and 150 minutes - the same  range of length as most movies/plays/ musicals and concerts.

My 'book' ,  "MO goes PO, 1939-1945" , is actually a series of 16 separate but connected essays easy of novella length.

Hopefully each will average around 12,500 words, giving an overall length for the entire series of 200,000 words.

I have had to condense the story greatly.

 This meant I had to pick just sixteen key days, over a war that lasted six years and raged over 2000 separate days.

As a result, I have gone back 'n' forth/ forth 'n' back over the specific sixteen dates, so I can still tell the story succinctly but accurately and dramatically.

So here are my tentative dates and titles - always subject to further change, of course:

January 1st 1941 : "We Are The Dead".


March 15th 1941 : "Synthetic Hope".


May 20th 1941: "Life Unworthy" .


September 30th 1941 : "Thank You - And GOODBYE" .


January 30th 1942 : "Kristall Lust" .


March 12th 1942 : "Patient Betrayal" .


June 30th 1942 : "Censored" .


November 6th 1942 : "Going Native" .


January 29th 1943 : "Hill Of Beans" .


June 14th 1943 : "When Doctors Gossip" .


August 11th 1943 : "Fire This Time" .


October 30th 1943 : "Patricia, Harriet and Mae" .


January 25th 1944 : "Saved By Face" .


March 19th 1944 : "The Great White Hope" .


June 23rd 1944 :  "Lazarus, Too" .


August 15th 1944 : "Blanket Harbour" .


Some will also have explanatory subtitles ...