Story-a-Day May 2018

I'm a big fan of writing events that bring together a community in pursuit of some nutty writing goal. Last year I participated in National Novel Writing Month in November, as well as the Three-Day-Novel Challenge in September. I won NaNoWriMo for the first time, completing my rough draft of The Suicide Club, and came out of 3DNC with 35,000 words towards a rough draft of Walking on Water. It worked out really well for me, and I recently came across another one writing event.

Story-a-Day (apparently we're calling it "StaDa" for short) is run by a woman named Julie Duffy. It's actually a lot easier than those other challenges I mentioned. All you have to do is write one short story every day. Considering some people write flash fiction as short as six words, this isn't a tall order. But it does mean you close out the month with a stack of short stories.

I have a tendency for my stories to run long, so this is going to be challenging for me in that respect. It's just not plausible to write a fifteen thousand word short story in a day. NaNo is a massive challenge, and that only requires 1,667 words a day. So I'm going to have to keep these short stories to a max of about five thousand words, and most will probably have to come in between one and two thousand.

So this should be a fun challenge for me. While not a difficult feat in itself, this will challenge my ability to maintain a writing habit and to bottle my usual workmanship into a smaller package. I'm looking forward to it, and afterwards, I should have a lot of work to sell.