I self-publish a new short story every month, and I try to keep at least six in the hole so that I have some time to send each one to the magazines and anthologies. Right now, I’ve only got three, soon to be two, so I need to write some short stories. Sounds like it’s time for a writing challenge!
So for the month of September, in addition to working on Children of the Starry Sea (though at a slower pace), I plan to write 40k words of short stories—enough for a small collection, which should fill out the buffer for a while. That comes to between 1,500 and 1,800 words a day, which honestly shouldn’t be that hard, since once I tend to get going on a short story, I’ll write it to the end, whether that’s 2k words or 4k words. I’ll spend the next few months workshopping them through my writing group and cleaning them up, then put them out on submission.
For purposes of this challenge, I’m going to include some of the short story fragments I have lying around, since those need to be cleaned up and turned into something useful. Also, I’ll definitely be working on some Zedekiah Wight stories, since I desperately need more of those to put out into the world. Also some Christopher Columbus stories, though it looks like those are going to get picked up by one of the magazines soon, so look out for that.
As an incentive, if I manage to accomplish this writing challenge, I’ll buy myself a couple of things on my Amazon wish list. I tend to put things on that list and forget about them, or else decide that it’s not worth spending the money, so it should be a good incentive. And I’ll post about each story as I write them. One of the things I want to do is to go through the whole Mythulu deck and write at least one story with each card. This would be a great time to do that.
So get ready! This should be a lot of fun!
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