Novels

Reader,

I hate to admit it, but novels terrify me.  I understand how to write scenes, and even short stories, but a novel length work still sends me quivering away.  The more I struggle with my varying projects that look to be novel length, the more I worry they'll never be good enough, and I'll never be good enough.

Don't get me wrong, I've participated in National Novel Writing Month twice thus far, and even won it once.  I feel my novel from last year had amazing premise, but I am at a loss for where to go from there.  The novel as it stands now is only a third done, and has been sitting on my net-book for months untouched.  I hope to participate in NaNoWriMo again this year, if only for the fun of it, but novels still terrify me.

So why tell you this?  I have a project that I'm planning out.  It's a project I was hoping would make a powerful short story, one I could send to the magazines in a few months once I polish it out a few times.  So imagine my horror when the story starts to grow bigger than a short story.  The themes and issues are too large, I fear, to condense into even a twenty-four page short story (Glimmer Train's maximum word count is 12,000 words).  Only time will tell how big this story will get, and how far I can revise it down.

Are you scared of novel length works?  Why or why not?
Also, when do you know when a project is a short story, and when it's destined for something more?

Until next time,
Rose