A middle-aged man skips out on his life and goes east to try to reconnect with the past he left behind.
Can you ever really go home?
A nameless everyman thumbs a ride on a dark highway, running from feelings that he has wasted his youth, his life.
But where is he running to?
Now, as he sets out to retrace the past that brought him to his present, his journey threatens to give him answers he won’t like to the questions swirling inside him.
If you like dramas where characters search for meaning and redemption in the fleeting rush of life, and find hope, you’ll love Long Way Home.
This short novel adheres to a form where where every scene is limited to a “ficlet”, a block of text no longer than 1024 characters. The result is as beautiful as it is brief, as powerful as it is poetic.
Q and A
Q. So, this says “ficlet” and “novelette”, does that mean it’s a short story?
A. No. A novelette is a full-length work of fiction between 10 and 20 thousand words long. This one is 10,358 words long. It is a complete story that could be a movie, with lots of characters, actions, events, subplots, and the rest you’d expect to find in a novel.
Q. So, are the scenes short stories?
A. No, they are scenes in a full-length work of fiction.
Q. Is this book made from ficlets you wrote before for ficlets.com or somewhere?
A. No, this is a completely new and (hopefully) original story.
Q. Why don’t the characters have names?
A. At first it was a practical choice to try to keep the character count low, but it became a stylistic choice because I liked the idea that readers would fill in names from people in their own experience.
Q. Will you be doing more of these?
A. Most definitely. This was fun to write, and I think it turned into a powerful story that is quick to read but packs a wallop.
