It’s impossibile to write 52 bad stories in a row.

Many of you probably know of November as NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50,000 word rough draft within the month of November. It’s pretty nifty – you can use the official site to track your progress and earn badges. There are pep talks and events and lots of cool support networks to help you with ideas and motivation. Unfortunately, novel writing just isn’t for me, at least not at this point in my life. And even if it is, 50k words in 30 days isn’t my thing. It’s just too specific of a goal in a direction I’m not super interested in taking.

So instead I’m going to start something I’ve been intending to do for quite a while – since I was still in university. I’m going to do the Ray Bradbury 52-week short story challenge.

There’s a famous Bradbury quote that goes, “It’s impossibile to write 52 bad stories in a row.” The idea is to write a short story once a week for 52 weeks – an entire year. It’s definitely a much longer term goal than NaNoWriMo, but I feel like this challenge is much more within my wheelhouse than a crunch-time novel. I’m going to try to have each story be around 2000 words. If some are shorter and some are longer, that’s fine. Especially if they are shorter, I’m okay with that. The point is to write short stories so as long as the short story is complete then that’s it.

Some of the stories I’ll post here. Ones I think are really good or ones that I want some feedback on, probably. It’s going to be a long year. Wish me luck!