This gives a final printed size around 200-250 pages. Novels are usually printed around 350-400 words per page, and a novel of publishable length is usually around 80-100,000 words. Half of the books on this list are novels, not novellas. Elsewhere, it retains its original, derogatory meaning of a novel of a light, romantic, or sentimental character.) Certainly, the 'novelette' has not been accepted as a distinct form outside genre fiction. There is some question as to whether the appearance of the novelette as a separate formal category is simply a commercially-driven attempt to subdivide the traditional short story category for competition purposes: works of this 'novelette' length have been described elsewhere as long short stories. It seems to have had its origins as an accepted subcategory at the 1955 Hugo Awards, where it designated a work of 'between 7,500 and 17,500 words'. (Note: The situation has been complicated by the use of the term 'novelette' to describe a work intermediate between the long short story and the novella. The vagueness of the description may be seen from the definition offered by Wikipedia, below.įrom Wikipedia: A novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative normally longer than a short story but shorter than a novel.

The distinctions between a novella and a short novel, and between a novella and a long short story, are not absolutely clear: but, in general, the novella is of such a length that, published together, no more than four novellas would make a single novel-length book. These boundaries are approximate, as there is no generally agreed definition of a novella other than that it is of intermediate length. Listen from 1:45:19.A novella is a fictional prose narrative, as a rule of thumb more than 20,000 but fewer than 50,000 words in length.

For the first time, some of those interviews have now been broadcast - on BBC Radio Scotland's Good Morning Scotland programme.

In the 1970s, Bill worked with Doug Allan, the diver and nature cameraman who many people may know from Sir David Attenborough’s landmark documentaries such as Blue Planet, Planet Earth and Life.ĭoug recorded a series of interviews with Bill in 2016, a few years before the pearl fisherman died, to reveal some of the stories behind his remarkable career. Pearl fishing became illegal in Scotland in 1998, bringing a close to that chapter of the country's history. Scottish freshwater pearls were said to be popular with royals and the Romans, and there was one man who knew more about them than anyone else.īill Abernethy was one of the Scotland’s last professional pearl fishers, and was responsible for finding Scotland’s largest freshwater pearl in living memory – the Abernethy pearl, which was revealed to the world in the 1960s.

The pearl novella