Tag: short stories

The Story-a-Day Challenge and How to Set ABC Goals for Writers

In September, I set out to participate in the Story-a-Day challenge. If you haven’t heard of it, Julie Duffy runs a challenge called Story-a-Day in May and September. As the title implies, she emails you a different prompt each day from which you are challenged to complete an entire story, beginning to end, in one day. These stories can be as short as you want; the only goal is to finish them. Ideally, by the end of the month, you’ll have 30 completed story drafts.

green typewriter on brown wooden table
Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels.com

If you’re familiar with human nature, you won’t be surprised to hear that I did not end the month with 30 finished stories. I wrote 12 stories, 4 of which were complete drafts and the rest of which were outlines or ideas or the first third of a story before I ran out of time or lost the will to finish.

So do I consider my Story-a-Day experience a failure?

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Truly Fantastic Fiction: A Review of Writers of the Future Vol 36

Cover for Writers of the Future volume 36

 Either I’m getting better at reading short stories, or the Writers of the Future contest for 2019 had truly epic submissions, because I found almost every story in volume 36 compelling. I am not usually a short story reader, but I am trying to become one to expose myself to more ideas in my limited reading time. Volumes like this give me great motivation to continue in that endeavor.

Notes on individual stories, attempting to be spoiler free:

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Writing Lessons from Reading Ray Bradbury

Observations from reading a collection of stories by a science fiction master

Confession: I haven’t read short stories since graduating from college.

This is probably not much of a shock to you. Unless you are a writing professional, you probably don’t read short fiction either. Novels really are the prevailing art of the day. But I’ve been trying to get back into them because they let you see a whole idea very quickly. I will never be able to read as many books as I wish I could, especially since I read so many genres. But with short stories, I can at least get a taste of what an author is like.

A great tool for this has been the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. I recommend it to everyone. It’s like Reading Rainbow but for grownups! And the vast majority of the stories fall into the SFF genre, so I’m getting exposed to a lot of authors I wouldn’t have time for otherwise.

But I set a goal to read one whole collection by a classic SFF author this winter. I wanted to really understand what one author was about without having to spend a year reading their whole backlist. I picked Ray Bradbury merely because I was looking for authors who had written about time travel, and his story “A Sound of Thunder” is, as far as I know, the origin of the butterfly effect as used in fiction.

Well, turns out most of his other stories are not about time travel, but I did enjoy reading A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories by Ray Bradbury. Some of my observations from the collection:

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5 Thoughts from Winning NaNoWriMo for the First Time, and What’s Next

I did it! I started this month with zero words in my novel Alchemist of Heroes, and on Saturday, I finished with 50,076 words in my novel. A few notes from my NaNoWriMo experience:

1. Don’t quit, even if the book you are writing is terrible. I spent the second weekend of NaNoWriMo worrying about what to do about my novel. My plot was stuck, I had no idea where to go from here or how to make it believeable. I didn’t like my main character because she was too passive. I thought about just starting my book over again with a different angle. But I didn’t. On Monday, I just did a five year time jump and kept going. And I started to like my book again. But I got plot-blocked at least two more times during the month, where I had no idea how to write what my outline said I was supposed to write next. One of the most valuable things I learned from NaNo was to keep writing and not worry about how it would turn out and if the writing would be worth it. I ignored self-doubt and kept going, and it turned out better than I thought. By writing through to the end, I found that it is normal and expected to feel like whatever you are currently working on is terrible. Finish it first, then decide if it’s terrible.

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