How long is too short?

Well, YA novel wise. After a grreat deal of trawling through publishers websites, the ones which care to give details of requirements, not just the requirement that they don't require anything at all from you new writer, thank you very much, but actual submission requirements, I have found that word counts can vary between 20,000 and a vague 'around 50,000.
So, at the moment I'm around half way through, meaning I will manage about 30, 000 words, but it seems I will be narrowing down the list of possible places to sub, which is pretty narrow already.
Frown.
Hmmph.
The answer is to just get on with it and worry about where it goes later, I suppose.
Which I should really do, having already accumulated a number of 'nearly finished' novels that have no home to go to :(
Do you write for a target market and therefore a specific word count, or just go with the flow and figure out what to do with your masterpiece afterwards?

Mischa doesn't really care either way.

Unwanted Gifts

Aww, it's a hard life.

This naughty little girl brought me a bird the other day. Luckily, she dropped it, when I went to inspect the poor thing, it was still breathing. So I shut Misch indoors and put poor little bird on the shed roof, hoping she might recover. She was breathing very, very fast and I think she was in schock. I spoke softly to her, hoping she knew I meant no harm. Then I went away, checking up on her ten minutes later to find her sat upright, she'd turned around, breathing slower, so was obviously feeling better. As I got closer, she suddenly took off. I cheered as she flew away and she chirped. I like to think she was saying, 'thanks, I'm ok now!'

I don't know anything about birds, but I have just looked her up and I'm pretty sure she was a female greenfinch. I found the website here, Great for identifying birds.

I hadn't thought much about birds, but now I'm quite interested to know which ones are coming in the garden, instead of assuming they're all sparrows. It never fails to amaze me, the vast wealth of info there is out there in cyberspace.

Anyway, naughty girl is forgiven, seeing as she didn't hurt it. Funnily enough, my story about the cats has just arrived, in 'The Last Laugh' which is very exciting. The story mention's Mischa's (named Calamity in the story) various gifts to me, alive and dead.
I love it, here's a picture. I'm so thrilled to be in an actual book!



Yay!! (Dances about with book in arms)
I am now in a submitting frenzy, I don't want this to be a one-off. I've had two rejections this week, but not to worry...