writing process – Words Deferred

Five-Finger Brainstorming for Fiction

I have a day job in software development where I’ve worked with large corporations. Thanks to that job, I’ve had plenty of exposure to corporate efficiency buzzwords and processes, from lean six sigma black belts to leveraging synergies.

While the eye-rolls induced by these terms are often justified, they usually start with a useful kernel of truth before metastasizing into something a VP drones on about in the all-hands meeting as everyone tries not to cringe.

This brainstorming method is based on the five whys, a corporate-speak process for digging a few levels deep to find the real root of a problem. I like it for brainstorming fiction ideas is because it is fast and easy and generates some unexpected connections.

Five Finger Brainstorming

Start with the first premise that pops into your head. It can be almost anything. It doesn’t have to be particularly interesting or story-worthy. However, don’t be afraid to start with something big like a hostage negotiation or first contact with aliens.

Example:

A man kills his neighbor…

Next, ask yourself why that first event happened, or what it implies. Repeat this until you’re at least five levels deep. You can count them off on the fingers of one hand.

Don’t think hard. Just write down the first thing that pops into your head each time. This technique works best if you let your subconscious take the wheel.

A man kills his neighbor…

because the neighbor knows his secret…

his secret is that he is hiding an alien in his basement…

because he is in love with it…

because he is an alien too.

Next, look at this sentence or paragraph as though a breathless child had just run up and told you this story. What questions would you have? I usually have a couple. These questions are natural jumping-off points for expanding the idea further.

Are they the same species of alien?

Why does one need to be hidden? Does one pass for human while the other doesn’t?

What happens after the murder?

Bonus: Story Trees

You can expand on this with a different style of brainstorming—one that is slower and more methodical. Try it with an idea that feels like it has potential, where you weren’t satisfied with your initial blurbs.

Look at each answer as a branching point in a tree. The original idea is the root. Instead of expanding that idea once, expand it in five different ways. Then go down the chain for each of those branches.

(Why yes, my MSPaint skills are incredible. Thanks for noticing.)

Be aware that filling out all the branches results in exponential blurbs. If you don’t want to go that far, just fill in a few branches that pique your interest. Remember, inspiration often strikes when you’re straining to come up with one or two more ideas. On the other hand, you’re under no obligation to stop at five if you want to keep going.

Two Techniques that Work Great Together

The five-finger technique helps dig deeper into the reasons and consequences of an initial idea or event. The story tree forces exploration of alternatives, which can sometimes get you past easy, tropey explanations and into more interesting territory.

In brainstorming, quantity leads to quality. With these techniques you can generate a lot of ideas quickly, so don’t be precious about them. They’re meant to be quick and disposable. So start counting, and come up with something new!

Year of Short Stories — Week #52 Retrospective

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

The Final Tally

Stories – 7
Submissions this year – 35 (5 still out)
Acceptances – 1
Rejections – 29 (11 higher tier)

Thus ends my Year of Short Stories.

Looking at these numbers, I do wish I had gotten more stories out the door, and I would have loved to get more acceptances. However, I think this is an excellent starting point. If nothing else, I have had a ton of fun writing and submitting stories, and I feel very comfortable with the process now.

The only thing I can do to increase that acceptance count is to write more stories to the best of my ability and continue sending them out.

Refining the Process

Prior to this year, I wrote short stories haphazardly, when an idea struck me and kept my interest. I submitted pieces occasionally, but I never pursued it with any seriousness.

This year, I took it seriously. I polished up a couple of finished stories and wrote several more. I sent stories through Critters critique, while submitting more than 50 of my own critiques of others’ work. I revised those stories far more than anything I have written before.

I know that many authors will grind their teeth while thinking about submitting their work to publishers, but I will argue that this is important practice. Internalizing the standard formatting, writing your own biographical blurb, and learning to write a cover letter—however brief—is valuable. Adjusting all of it to a publisher’s expectations is also important experience.

Today’s technology makes it possible to write alone, revise alone, and publish instantly. I don’t think that’s the way to produce great work, and the long tail of Amazon e-books is evidence of it. The old stereotype of the reclusive author is the exception, not the rule. Creativity is a feedback loop, and that means authors who want to take their craft seriously need to develop professional skills (like selling themselves and their work), and seek honest and tough feedback to actively improve.

Getting a story published by a small website; or a big podcast; or a top-tier, pro-payment magazine tells you something about what you’ve written. “This isn’t quite what we’re looking for” rejections and “send us more of your stuff” rejections are little puzzle pieces that slowly assemble themselves into way markers for future stories.

The indie publishing pundits loves to rag on all the gatekeepers of traditional publishing, and I don’t think anyone should feel beholden to the gatekeepers. But I do think that your writing will become a lot stronger if you push yourself to write stories that can compete with hundreds of other submissions in a slush pile, and catch the eye of jaded, chain-smoking editors who have read more stories in the past year than most of us read in our lifetimes.

That editor doesn’t get to unilaterally decide what’s a good story and what isn’t. But if you can’t find anyone immersed in stories who really likes the thing you’ve written, then it might be time to revise it, or set it aside and write the next thing.

Publishing stories the traditional also way forces you to find your audience. You have to learn what kind of readers and editors like the stuff you’re writing, and that’s incredibly valuable information if you want to get your stories in front of readers who will love them.

The Joy of Short Stories

I love novels, and I’m sure they account for the vast majority of the words I’ve read in my lifetime. Unfortunately, writing a novel is like slaying a giant—it’s not the best thing to try when you’re still learning how to swing a sword.

This past year of experience has confirmed for me that writing short stories is a fantastic way to improve my writing quickly. Writing short stories allows me to jump between genres, to try out new characters and new settings. I can spend a few thousand words with an idea and then let it go. The price of failure is low, and the joy of experimentation is sky-high.

Writing short stories and actively submitting them means I’m exercising all of my authorial muscles. I’m jumping between first drafts, revisions, critiques, and submissions. I’m constantly iterating and incorporating feedback into individual works, but also into my process as a whole.

Rejection and Acceptance

The final takeaway that I have from the past year of writing short stories is more of a Zen attitude toward my own work.

Writing is often incredibly personal. We joke about our stories being like our children. But that kind of protective love makes it harder to improve. It’s hard to take negative feedback on a story if you think of it as your baby. It’s hard to take rejection.

Luckily, the easiest way to overcome those feelings is through brute force. Write lots of stories. Get as much criticism as you can, and then improve them. Send them out, and get rejected, repeatedly. By the time you’ve built up your own little one-person story factory, those pointed critiques start to be fun, because they provide opportunities to make the story better. The rejections roll off your back, and you submit again and move on.

I recently listened to David Sedaris on a podcast, and he said one of the keys to his success was never confusing the writing with the publishing. Ironically, I think the best way to internalize that sentiment is to be repeatedly rejected by publishers.

If you really want to, you can try to follow the market trends. You can improve your odds of publication by submitting to venues that fit your work, and submitting relentlessly. Trying to get paid is hard. Every submission is a job interview with hundreds or thousands of applicants.

And yet, if you already love the writing, getting paid is just a bonus.

Goals for 2025

My Year of Short Stories may be done, but my short story writing will continue. If anything, I’d like to finish more stories this year than I did in 2024. After all, the story factory is built, and I have no shortage of ideas.

Of course, I’d like to get a few more stories published in the upcoming year as well, but I have less control over that. So I’ll just keep submitting.

My 500th Post!

As 2024 comes to a close, I’ve reached a shocking milestone: 500 posts. Words Deferred started as an experiment in trying to write (and think about writing) more, and has become an integral part of my life. It’s strange to remember a time when I wasn’t documenting my writing and putting my thoughts out onto the internet.

I don’t normally go back and read my old posts, but I decided to use this occasion to peruse those 500 posts and see what stood out.

2020

I started Words Deferred in the autumn of 2020, almost exactly a decade after blogs stopped being cool. (Of course, blogs are still around, but like everything else on the internet they now have to live on a platform like Medium or Substack.) Looking back at those early days, I really didn’t know what I was going to be writing, but had some ideas: posts about technique, serialized fiction, and…live-streaming writing sessions?

I haven’t streamed anything, and I probably never will, but those other two categories were the core content of this site for quite some time. I quickly started the Reference Desk series about tools and resources for writers, which eventually grew to twenty-one entries. I also began to experiment with posts about craft and technique in those first few months, like Outlining vs. Exploratory Writing, Writing Spikes, and Guessing the Future for Science Fiction.

2021

Around the end of 2020, I also began working on Razor Mountain, my episodic sci-fi mystery novel. I eventually wrote 47 “pre-production” development journals that covered the process of outlining a novel, crafting a book description and author bio, and making a cover image. I began actually writing and posting chapters of Razor Mountain in late 2021, and continued the development journals as I went.

The other things I did in 2021 were mostly to get a break from planning and writing Razor Mountain. I played around with the shortest of short stories: microfiction and drabbles. I was looking for good writing blogs on WordPress, and started posting reblogs as a result of that. I began a sporadic series about Games for People who Prefer to Read, and started my tradition of the State of the Blog.

2022

I have always been leery of traditional reviews, and I’ve struggled to find interesting ways to discuss the things I was reading. In 2022, that mostly took the form of X Things I Learned from Y posts. Later in the year, I incorporated that into my Storytelling Class series where I discussed different aspects of writing fiction with my daughter.

I continued posting Razor Mountain chapters and the corresponding development journals through all of 2022, making it about halfway through the book by the end of the year.

I also found time for a seven-part series on writing short stories, and a complete re-theming of Words Deferred to the current look and feel.

2023

I posted the final chapter of Razor Mountain in the summer of 2023. Razor Mountain was a huge project, and I knew it would require a ton of revision to get into a state where I could consider it properly done. I also knew that the way it was developed would make it challenging to sell in traditional publishing, and I didn’t find self-publishing it very appealing. After posting the final chapter, I collected some feedback and began revisions, but I was feeling burned out and eventually decided to step away from the project.

Further evolution of book reviews resulted in a new format, the read reports. I also somehow managed to complete a full NaNoWriMo while writing daily updates, which was likely my heaviest month of writing since starting this website.

2024

This year, I cut back significantly on my posting schedule, and I’m on track for about 1/2 the wordcount of previous years. That was mainly to allow for more non-blog writing time.

That non-blog writing time was devoted primarily to the Year of Short Stories, a project that allowed me to really mix up my writing life. Not only could I write many different stories in different styles, but I could break up my time between first drafts; critique and revisions; and submissions. It was a great year of writing, and it only made me more excited to continue writing short stories.

Other content this year included a solidification of the format of Read Reports with a monthly cadence.

I had long considered some sort of brainstorming or writing prompt series, and that finally manifested as the Story Idea Vault.

Statistics

Finally, I like to be open with my data, just in case it’s interesting to others. Here are some statistics from a little over 4 years of blogging.

Posts: 500
Total Wordcount: 439,000
Views: 15,770 (not counting WP Reader or email subs, as far as I can tell)
Visitors: 11,468 (again, not counting Reader or email)
Most Views in a Day: 105
Most Popular Post: Great Writing – Can You Say Hero? (over 5000 views)
Most Posts in a Month: 29 in Nov. 2023 (for NaNoWriMo)

What’s Next?

The end of my Year of Short Stories and the start of 2025 means it’s time to think about change. I’m currently thinking about my writing New Year’s resolutions and how I want to schedule my work over the next year. I’ll talk more about that in an upcoming post.

Year of Short Stories — Weeks #50 and #51

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Stories in Progress – 2
Submissions This Week – 2
Submissions Currently Out – 5
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 29 (11 higher tier)

Submissions

I missed last week, so this is a double update. I’m also pretty sure that I started this series a few weeks into the year, and yet I’m approaching week fifty-two…which makes me suspect my count got messed up somewhere. In any case, we’re approaching the end of the year!

One of my drabbles came back two weeks ago, and I had another that had been sitting idle, so I spent some time digging through Duotrope for good places to submit them. I still struggle to find good potential homes for these, as they’re technically “reprints” that have been on the blog previously. I’m currently looking at non-paying markets to expand my options.

Payment in cents per word are generally paltry for 100-word stories anyway, so pursuing the paid options is really just for the ego boost of getting into a bigger, more difficult-to-crack publication.

The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk also came back to me in the past week with a form rejection, which is always disappointing after a longish wait. So it goes. I sent it back out alongside one of the drabbles.

Revisions

I haven’t been doing much on the Red Eyes revisions, and whenever I’m not getting things done, I have that feeling that I ought to work harder. However, I did have several new ideas for the story in the past week, and this is something that happens fairly often when I’m not actively working much on a story, but I have it on my mind. It makes me wonder if the extra time is necessary, or if I’d get to a similar place by spending more time at the keyboard (or at least staring at the screen).

This sort of thing also makes me wonder whether it’s better to let stories sit like this, and work on other things in the meantime, or whether it’s better to stick to one thing to completion. Switching between stories means thinking less about that story in waiting, which means those new ideas and changes in perspective may not come.

I tend to vacillate back and forth on this, sometimes focusing more on a single thing, and sometimes switching between several. Maybe that’s the way to do it.

Goals for Next Week

None. I’m going to enjoy the holidays with my family. If I write, I write. If I don’t, that’s fine too.

Year of Short Stories — Week #49

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Stories in Progress – 2
Submissions This Week – 0
Submissions Currently Out – 4
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 29 (11 higher tier)

A Quick Update

I don’t have a lot to report this week. A single rejection came back for No More Kings, which was something of a long-shot to begin with, being a drabble and a reprint. I’ve got a couple of these drabbles just hanging around taking up space, and I should probably spend some time finding places to submit them again in the next week or two.

I’m still working on Red Eyes revisions, although I admittedly didn’t get a lot done this week. Still, any progress is good progress, and a long winter vacation is on the horizon.

Approaching the End of the Year

I’m beginning to feel the end of 2024 closing in. For my first year really dedicated to short stories, I’m fairly pleased with the results. I’m sure I’ll do a final retrospective, but I’ve already managed to make 30 submissions. Not too shabby.

Goals for Next Week

Look for places to send drabbles
Continue Red Eyes revisions

Year of Short Stories — Week #48

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Stories in Progress – 1
Submissions This Week – 0
Submissions Currently Out – 5
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 28 (11 higher tier)

Submissions

No rejections or new submissions this past week (or rather, this past 4-5 days, since I was late in posting last week’s update). My lone submission the previous week was Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug, which had just come back to me with a contest honorable mention.

Since I do a lot of my writing work on the weekends, I often resend stories and write blog posts in the same day. Before I do that, I look at the Duotrope Theme and Deadline Calendar, and the Publishing News. The calendar gives me a convenient list of themed issues and anthologies with deadlines in the next month, and the news page gives me a list of new publishers and those that have recently opened to submissions. These two lists are incredibly valuable when you’re sending out short stories.

Most weeks, I don’t find anything particularly exciting in the theme calendar, but it’s still worth checking because I occasionally find an upcoming issue or anthology whose theme fits one of the stories that I’m resubmitting that week.

Last week was one of those weeks, and I found an anthology that sounds perfect for Dr. Clipboard. Sure enough, I got a response within a few hours, holding the story for further consideration.

Further Consideration

This is the first time I’ve gotten this style of response for a story submission. As is typical for anything related to short story submissions, Aeryn Rudel has an article. He puts holds, further consideration, and short listing all in the same bucket—a story that someone at the publisher read and liked enough to consider publishing it.

Since most markets are inundated with submissions and will only end up publishing a fraction of the stories they like, it makes sense for them to keep their options open until the end of their submission window.

Not every publisher notifies the writer that their story is being held. They’ll just hold it and either send an acceptance or rejection when they’ve made a final decision. As a writer, you can appreciate a publisher that communicates the hold, or you can be frustrated to have yet another reason to get your hopes up, and possibly disappointed if that hold results in a rejection.

Personally, I’d rather have the additional information. Even if the story ends up being rejected, a positive, personalized response still tells me that the story is probably solid, and I just need to find the right publication for it.

Stories in Progress

I still have some projects lingering from my truncated November “PerShoStoWriMo.” I haven’t gotten a lot of words down for those stories, but they’re still taking up brain space, and I may spend more time with them in the coming weeks.

I’m still in the process of condensing the critiques I received for Red Eyes into actionable changes. In some cases this is a straightforward rewording or cut, but in other cases it requires a fair amount of thought to figure out how I want to address a concern (or if I want to address it at all). I may write a post in the future about this process.

The most interesting piece of feedback I received was that the length of the story is good. It clocks in around 6,500 words, which is long for me, and I explicitly asked readers if they saw any good places to trim that word count. A few readers ignored the question, but most of them said there were no good places to make a significant cut. A couple even said that they’d like to see a longer version of the story. One suggested a novelette, the other suggested a full-blown novel.

While I don’t plan to follow that advice, the unified response does alleviate my fears that the story is too long. I suppose I’m just stuck with a longer story, and I’ll have to deal with that when I’m finished editing and have to look for markets to submit to.

Goals for Next Week

Continue revising Red Eyes
Spend some time on one of those other story ideas

Year of Short Stories — Week #46 & 47

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Stories in Progress – 2
Submissions This Week – 1
Submissions Currently Out – 5
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 28 (11 higher tier)

Happenings

It has been a busy two weeks, and I’ve been neglecting the blog. My wife and I had a double 40th birthday party, which necessitated the first thorough cleaning of the new house. We also finally finished putting away all the little things that had been neglected since the move, and added some finishing touches, like hanging pictures and paint touch-ups.

PerShoStoWriMo (my short-story-writing replacement for NaNoWriMo) was a bust. I tend to do well in these kinds of challenges when I have a good plan at the start and get ahead early. Unfortunately, I started this November a day behind, with merely a concept of a plan, and fell steadily further behind.

I did write drafts for several stories, but I’m nowhere near the original word count goal. Yes, there are still a couple days of November left, but I’m ending it here. It was fun and moderately productive, and that’s good enough.

I do still have one story, tentatively called The Loneliest Number, that’s partly done, and I may still finish it before the end of the month. However, I’ve also got other important things to do, like eat a huge Thanksgiving meal and lay on the couch.

Work in Progress

One of the things that distracted me from PerShoStoWriMo was critiquing. I did a ton of Critters critiques in November so my story, Red Eyes, could go out. Happily, I am now caught up, and I received ten responses, which is pretty good for a 6500-word story.

My next step is to compile all that feedback into a bullet-point list of bigger issues, smaller issues, and potential solutions. Then I’ll get into the revisions.

Submissions

I received two responses for previously submitted stories. My drabble, A Going Away Party, got a form rejection. Interestingly, this was a double submission to a publisher with separate handling of sci-fi and fantasy submissions. The second submission is still marked as “in progress.”

It’s always difficult to guess what’s happening with submissions, but it’s at least potentially a good sign that the second story didn’t get rejected around the same time as the first. Maybe it’s at least being held for consideration. Of course, it could just be a completely separate queue and editors for each story, and the delay doesn’t really mean anything.

The other response was from the Writers of the Future contest, for Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug. It received an honorable mention, which is nice, although a little further investigation reveals that the contest has quite a few tiers below first, second and third place. There are about a dozen finalists and semi-finalists. Then there are about fifty “silver” honorable mentions, and even more regular honorable mentions beneath that.

There’s no way to determine exactly how many entries the contest gets each quarter, but it’s free to enter and has a big cash prize, so it’s certainly a lot. At least hundreds, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was more than a thousand. So an honorable mention has some value, but I’d peg it as similar to one of those nice rejection letters that says “we liked your story, keep trying.”

I already sent Dr. Clipboard out again, this time to an anthology with a theme that feels like a pretty good fit. A Going Away Party is a drabble and technically a reprint, which makes it a little harder to find good places to send. I may just hang on to it until I see something like a theme issue where it makes sense to submit.

Goals for Next Week

Finish The Loneliest Number
Sift through Red Eyes critiques

Year of Short Stories — Week #43

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Stories in Progress – 5+
Submissions This Week – 1
Submissions Currently Out – 6
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 26 (10 personalized)

PerShoStoWriMo

Week one of my personal short story writing month is in the books, and it didn’t go well!

Okay, that’s not entirely true. I definitely didn’t pull NaNoWriMo “par” numbers, and I missed three days entirely. I’m currently trending toward about 50% of the goal wordcount of 50,000 words by the end of November. And yet, I’m pretty happy with my progress. I’ve blasted through drafts of four short stories so far, and I’m deep into a fifth (considerably longer) story.

I’m being productive with the time I have available. As usual I’m juggling my day job, my kids activities, and other family stuff.

Plus, I have over a week of vacation planned in November, so I may have some time to catch up. Even if I don’t, I’ll still be glad to have gotten quite a few words on the page.

Submissions

I resubmitted The Incident at Pleasant Hills, which came back to me last week.

I’m hoping that I’ll get some responses in the next month or so, but with end-of-year holidays fast approaching, I expect anything that I submit through the end of the year to be out until 2025.

Critiques

I’m still getting caught up on Critters critiques, but the end is in sight now. I’ll catch up sometime this week. This past week is actually when Red Eyes would have hit the top of the queue, so I’m not doing too bad in that regard.

Goals for Next Week

Get caught up on critiques!
Keep writing short stories for PerShoStoWriMo!

Year of Short Stories — Week #42

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Stories in Progress – 1
Submissions This Week – 0
Submissions Currently Out – 5
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 26 (10 personalized)

Submissions and rejections

Once again, a fairly quiet week. I did have one bit of news: after three months of waiting, I got a rejection from Analog Science Fiction. Admittedly, I expected to receive a rejection, and I expected it to take a long time. Analog is a bit notorious for very slow submission responses. Duotrope says they average 112 days for a response, with their longest reported response time just barely squeaking in under a year!

What was surprising was that the rejection was actually encouraging. Now, this is traditional publishing, so the encouragement consists of a single sentence: “I like your style of writing and suggest that you try us again.” I think that’s what Aeryn Rudel calls The Improved Form Rejection.

Still, Analog is one of the “big three” SFF magazines, and they’ve published enough Hugo and Nebula award winners to fill a few trophy cases, so I’ll happily take whatever encouragement they give, and I will likely try them again when I have another sci-fi piece.

NaNoWriMo? No. PerShoStoWriMo!

If you missed my previous post, I’m doing something a little different for November, and I’ve given it a dumb name. My guess was that I will write 10-15 short stories this month.

I started off on the right foot by missing Day 1 completely. No words written. On days two and three, I wrote a complete story each day, and comfortably met my “par” word counts (which still leaves me a day behind).

Both of these stories were for a secret project, and I have one or two more that I’m expecting to be similarly-sized. It’s looking like 10-15 stories might be a low estimate, but I’ll have a better feel for how things are going in a week or so.

Critiques

I am still painfully aware that I’m below my ratio on Critters, and Red Eyes is languishing in the holding pen, waiting. Writing 15 other stories probably won’t help with that problem, but I have been making progress and catching up. So long as I can finish a couple per week, Red Eyes should be back in the queue before the end of November.

Goals for Next Week

Resend The Incident at Pleasant Hills
Continue critiques
Blast out stories for PerShoStoWriMo!

Year of Short Stories — Week #40 and #41

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Stories in Progress – 1
Submissions This Week – 0
Submissions Currently Out – 6
Acceptances This Year – 1
Rejections This Year – 24 (9 personalized)

Mini-Update

Despite the two weeks since my last update, I don’t have a lot to report on. Stories are still out on submission. Red Eyes is queued for critique. I’m working on getting my Critters ratio back up to 75%, but it’s slow going.

I suppose the cynical and expedient thing to do would be to bang out some smaller, quick critiques just to get it done. However, I really do enjoy critiquing. When I first started with Critters, I used to struggle to write a few hundred words of (hopefully!) helpful feedback. Now I find that my critiques can easily hit a thousand words or more.

November Plans

Last year I posted daily updates for my NaNoWriMo experience. I considered doing the same thing this year and working on the second half of that same novel, but I don’t really want to put the year of short stories on hold for a month, especially in the home stretch.

Instead, I’ve decided that I’ll be sticking to the conventional NaNoWriMo goal of writing 40,000 words in a month, but attempting to hit that goal by writing short stories.

How many? As many as it takes.

Do I have enough ideas and half-finished stories for that? I guess we’ll find out together!

Goals for Next Week

Keep on critiquing!
Plan out the stories I’ll be writing in November.