Alas, Poor Larry!

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This week, my original content is a very short story. I originally wrote this for the 52-week short story challenge that I only got about 4 weeks into before stopping. So I guess I didn’t technically write it this week, but I did do a lot of editing to it. It’s mostly based on true events that happened when I was 5, though some details are maybe exaggerated and chronologically it’s probably not accurate. But it is a weird series of events that, in retrospect, make me realize I was kind of a weird kid.

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Unoriginality: A Writer’s Biggest Fear

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The past few days something has started growing on my mind. I don’t know what planted the seed, as it’s not something I had thought about too much beforehand. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m turning 25 in a few months and the “quarter-life crisis” machine is starting to spin its wheels. Whatever did it brought fertilizer though because it’s wrapped it’s tendrils around my brain and won’t let go. Hopefully writing this post out will help loosen the grip and let me think about other, more pressing, issues like whether it’s time I should finally get out of bed at 9am or what type of tea I’m going to have today.

What’s been growing on my mind is the idea and fear that I am completely unoriginal.

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52 Weeks of Writing

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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!