Complexity Simplified

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Writing Report

Books about Writing by Writers

It's been more than a little while since I wrote a writing report and I actually have a number of things to say - so here goes!

First, and very much at the forefront of my thoughts, is the Story A Day May challenge that I just completed. I started the month with big plans to write a story every day, but by May 3rd, I'd already missed a day and by the first week I'd missed three days and so on and so on. I've tried this challenge before and never made it past the first week, but this year I decided I would accept a result that was less than perfect - so I wrote stories when I could, and am happy to say that I ended with 11 "stories" on my list for the month.

These 11 are not all full stories - in fact, only two of them are, and both of those are stories I had started before. But I finished BOTH and have actually submitted both already. And one of them just got accepted - today! This is obviously very encouraging, so I have a plan to extend the success of this Story A Day experiment: Story A Week Summer!

A few years ago when I first heard about the Story A Day challenge, I tried it, gave up, but started my own version, which was a challenge to myself to finish a story every week that summer. I reported on that here and found it to be enormously successful - and powerful. By the end of the process of focusing on a story a week I knew I wanted to write full time, so applied and was accepted to the MA in Writing program at Johns Hopkins University.

That was the summer of 2013 and I look back, amazed that three years have gone by. I've just completed my coursework for the MA program and hope to finish my thesis by the end of the year. More importantly, I've completed the novel I was working on and started a second one. Things are going along really well and I trust that will continue - as long as I keep writing.

Welcome!