Sunshine for Christmas
By Mary Jo
It's Christmas novella season and I'm celebrating by releasing a freestanding e-edition of this story plus an audio version. Not that Sunshine for Christmas is a new story. It's one of five novellas included in my Christmas Revels collection, so if you have a copy of Christmas Revels, there's no need to buy a separate e-edition of Sunshine for Christmas.
But it was the very first novella I ever wrote and I started it with some wariness because I'd never written at this length before. (Most novellas are in the 20K-25K range, though they can be somewhat shorter or longer.)
The trick is to get a whole, satisfying story within a novella length, and it can be particularly challenging for a romance, where it takes time (and words!) to build a convincing relationship. This is one of the reasons that reunion/second chance at love stories are popular for novellas. The main characters already have a relationship, for better and worse, so a lot of the emotional groundwork has already been laid.
