hiccupx:
The character limit is there to help authors divide their stories into chapters. Chapters make the stories easier to read, because they can be read in small chunks. It's easy to remember where you got up to.
The chapter limit is 10,000 characters, which is generally the upper character limit of most short stories. If you have a longer story then you can use chapters and there's no limit on the number of chapters you can have.
Yes, but that’s a low limit and and artificial threshold. If i have a thematically coherent chapter that’s, say 15,800 characters (
very common for my stories), not only does the FF system break it into two, it
forces chapter numbering onto what thematically is _one_ chapter. As an author i am totally NOT good with a system forcing a maximum chapter length on me—especially one lower than the length of chapters of many professional authors in actual printed and e-books.
I didn’t save the exact link, but a few years ago Wikipedia had an article listing short stories as being