Years ago, I started writing Weekly Stories, where I’d get an idea, hammer out a story, and post it each week. There were three main reasons I did that. One, it’s good practice for writing. Two, it gave me a pool of stories to draw from to fill up collections. And three, it gave a reason for people to visit my webpage. But I stopped because I wanted to spend that time and energy on my “more important” stories. Also, back then I could get an idea and hammer out a somewhat decent story in a few hundred words. Now it seems every idea I get is for a novella. I don’t know if I’ve “grown” as a writer and want to delve deeper into topics, or if I’ve just burned through all of my few hundred-word story ideas.
That’s how everything stood at the end of 2022 when Twitter went into a death spiral. Which sucked for me because probably 90% of all my social media interaction/book marketing was done on Twitter. So I was in a bit of a panic trying to figure out how to adjust. One thing I had been thinking about was trying to do more with my webpage. So Monthly Stories was born.
The original plan was to take a month to come up with an idea and write it, and that’s how I went through 2023 and most of 2024. But for 2025 I wanted to give myself a bit of a break, so I scrapped the idea of having to come up with the idea and writing it all in a month. That worked okay, but 2025 was a rough year and I had some issues with burnout.
So the new plan starting in 2026 is instead of a story every month, I’ll do one every quarter. As always these are brand new stories never posted elsewhere. It’s likely for most of them I’ll get the idea and write the story that quarter, but some I may work on intermittently for four or five months. Hopefully, with less stress and lighter workload, I’ll be able to get some work done on my bigger projects. We’ll see.
First - TBD
Second - TBD
Third - TBD
Fourth - TBD
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