It's all in the word count

China's Xinhua News Agency reported yesterday that author Qian Fuchang has written a "novel" meant to be read on mobile phones via text messages. The "steamy tale of illicit love" consists of seventy chapters totalling about 4,000 words. I hate to break it to the author (not to mention the BBC and The Globe & Mail which carried the news item), but 4,000 words is not a novel, or even a novella — it's a freaking short story. For the record, novels start at about 50,000 words and most reputable publishers won't even look at manuscripts less than 70,000 words. So I guess it's back to the typewriter, Fuchang!

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According to the "fiction factor" website, works of fiction can be categorized by length as follows:

• Micro fiction: up to 100 words
• Flash fiction: 100-1,000 words
• Short story: 1,000-7,500 words
• Novelette: 7,500-20,000 words
• Novella: 20,000-50,000 words
• Novel: 50,000-110,000 words
• Epic: 110,000 words and up

Attention grammarians

Oxford University Press (OUP), publishers of a slew of dictionaries, recently identified the most common error in the English language. It's not the grocer's apostrophe and it's not confusing "its" with "it's" (an error now only committed by about eight percent of English speakers). No, the most common error in the English language is confusion or misuse of the words "diffuse" (meaning "not concentrated") and "defuse" ("to remove the fuse from or otherwise make less potent or harmful"). My guess would have been confusing "your" and "you're", but that didn't even make the shortlist. Other common confusions listed by OUP include rein/reign, pedal/peddle, tow/toe, pouring/poring, draw/drawer and their/there/they're.

Joyce, you randy devil

A bawdy three-page letter written in 1909 by literary icon, James Joyce, to his main squeeze, Nora Barnacle, just fetched a whopping £240,800 ($590,000 Canadian) at auction. If I'd known writing dirty paid so much money, I would have taken a course or something. Joyce's "Araby" is one of my all-time favourite short stories, but I've still got his daunting Ulysses (considered by many to be the best novel of the 20th century) on my "to read" list.

• Read the Sotheby's press release about the Joyce letter, which Sotheby's describes as "the missing link from the most famous erotic correspondence in modern literature."
• BBC News: "Joyce letter smashes sales record"
• Official "Bloomsday" centenary website (commemorating the 100th anniversary of the day of action in James Joyce's Ulysses: June 16, 1904).

As if there's not enough drivel on the Internet ...

So begins my literary "blog" — an online journal of crazed musings about books, writers, movies, form-letter rejection slips, barking canines from Hell, the exhorbitant price of cranberry juice, whatever comes to mind. (And yes, Hell has its own web page — check it out.)