I know, it’s a little weird having a Jack the Ripper tale in a book with an astronaut on the cover. The astronaut, or spaceman just pertains to the one story, “Rohmer’s Garden.” There are a variety of Sci fi stories in the book, actually, including the story that has Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks painting as a part of it. I mentioned it a few posts back.
In any case, the Ripper tale is the one where I gave you the sneak peek of the initial start of the story in the last post. I wasn’t at the time quite sure where the story was going to end up, or what direction things were going to go in. I also thought the story, based on my initial look at the first part, was going to be a minimum of around five thousand words. I figured the whole story would end up maybe at around seven thousand words. Boy was I off. Turns out, the whole story ended up being 17,718 words as it stands. That’s actually novella territory. I’m pretty sure it is going to be a novella upon completion. Don’t get me wrong, the ending of the story works as it is for a story. I could have stopped at at least five different points. Each time I closed on one of those points I intended to stop. For some reason, each time, I figured I would just play things out a little longer, just to see where it all was leading.
Remember how I said I liked to keep my collections of stories at around 43,000 words? I lied. Well, not really, as I was just thinking of my Civil War tales. Those books did end around there. However, The Red Kimono, my previous Sci fi collection was around 53,000. And, well, it turns out that Rohmer’s Garden is 54,594. But TRK was 13 stories, while RG is only 9. Don’t get me wrong, you get your money’s worth entertainment wise. It’s just that I had a couple of stories that came in a little longer, at 6k and 7k, and then the final one that I’m talking about. Remember me mentioning I stuck two stories in that I had previously written? I had to pull those back out. The story I mentioned about the guy in the coma (9k words) is going to have to go elsewhere, along with the other story I had meant to use.
I guess I could have held this Victorian era Sci fi tale out and then just waited till I had the complete novella done. But since I had given you a peek at it, and I was/am kind of excited about it, I wanted to use it now. So it’s there. Laura ends up in a cat and mouse chase with Jack the Ripper. I hope you check Rohmer’s Garden out. There are eight other good stories in the book. It varies. I know not everyone is going to like every story. Personally, I really like “Incentive Corps.” It was a little involved, but I had a lot of fun with it. I liked the main character, and his female companion. I like the way things turned out.
Oh, and the research on the detachable shirt collars was interesting. Turns out that they were invented in 1827 by a woman in Troy, NY. However, technically, they were around long before that in a ‘fashion’ (forgive the pun) in Shakespeare’s time and earlier. Back then, the bigger the collar (extending out eight inches or more), and the more folds (as many as thirty, if I remember correctly) the higher the stature. And, supposedly they are making a comeback. Well, not the Shakespeare kind, but the more normal ones. It’s one of the joys of being a writer, getting to research such things for a story.