Here are some other specific examples of paranoia: 1  Loathing or hatred of activities you or normal people would usually feel comfortable in, such as parties, large crowds, and the mall.  Excessive worry about what people think about you, or that they are laughing about or whispering about you behind your back.
As a point of reference for the genre writer, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America define short story length in the Nebula Awards for science fiction submission guidelines as having a word count of fewer than 7,500.
Now, that's good advice. But I don't like to do things half-heartedly, so here is the bigger picture of length in fiction... A novel is anything over 50,000 words. A novella is between 20,000 and 50,000 words. A short story has a word count of under 20,000 words.