Last month, Julie wrote an excellent blog post about "Choosing the Best Length for Your Story", and I thought I'd offer another possibility for some writers: experimenting with short stories before writing a novel. My friend N.K. Jemisin (author of fabulous fantasy books you should read like the Inheritance trilogy and the Broken Earth series) often writes a short story as a "test run" for a novel she's thinking about writing. For example, her story