Lush can get prickly about song lyrics. Recently in one of my stories they stripped out a single line from The Doors song "Soul Kitchen." It wasn't even spoken or sung by a character; the implication was that the narrator merely thought about it. But it was the complete line, and when the story was published, the line was gone.
Much earlier I had someone sing four lines (I think) of Paul Simon's "Duncan." Then were a couple of lines of dialogue where she spoke to someone else about the meaning of the song. It must have been too much to simply remove, so the moderator sent it back and told me to rewrite it.
I didn't want to use something from online that was copyright to someone else. Thus I didn't use anything that matched my username, which is the name of an Amtrak train and before that one on the New York Central. Anything I did find wasn't that interesting anyway.
Thus I just used one of my own photos, which shows a mural on a fence near my house (the North Bronx). I picked it mostly because it seemed colorful.
Writing a novel is a very heavy lift. I thought I was doing one about three years ago, but then I broke out some pieces of it and published them on another site as short stories.
Eventually, I started doing series over there that probably will consist of maybe ten chapters at most. Perhaps when they are done, each series will be a sort of novella. I haven't done word counts yet, but supposedly novellas have 17,000 to 40,000 words. I will certainly will be in that range. Whether they will truly be readable as a continuous story is something I'm not sure of yet. Maybe they'll be like Winesburg, Ohio, which Sherwood, Anderson called "a group of tales." There is a central character in that who is followed over the course of about fifteen years.
Who could forget Thing, played by "Itself?" It was such a simple concept, just a hand coming out of a box, yet they did so much to make it funny.
