Self-Indulgent Blog Post: My Personal Writing Challenge

Good morning bitches readers.  I know, I haven't posted a blog in over a year because I don't give a damn about frequently updating my blog I've been busy working and writing 12 short stories under two pen names, with the majority being published under my Glenn Gamble pen name.   In short, blogging was a pain in the ass for me and I stopped.

Funny how much things change a year later.

 I'm no longer juggling writing with working, for I've been laid-off from my last employer.  I knew that day was coming for months in advance which gave me a lot of time to decide what I was going to do once the day finally came.

WRITE

But I haven't been writing.  For the two weeks I've been unemployed I haven't written much at all.   Honestly, I've been bullshitting thinking about the next phase in my life and the things that I have to do to get there — outside of writing. I haven't been doing a good job of motivating myself to park my ass in front of my computer to hammer out these stories.

Nope, I've been bullshitting resting, and quite frankly I've never been so lazy slept better.  I'm working out twice a day, and I even shaved my head, but I feel like I'm isolated out here in the suburbs with no friends to talk to and a ton of idle time.  No one understands what I've set out to do, and I don't expect people to understand, but for me, those social nuances makes writing such a solitary and lonely endeavor.  Sometimes I feel inadequate because I haven't put in the work that I need to put in on a daily basis, yet I have no one that I can call that can relate to how I'm feeling.  Most people will just say "quit being so hard on yourself," but I don't need my lack of productivity to be validated, nor do I need pity.  I need a peer and a mentor to give me guidance when it comes to the writing career that I'm pursuing, but its best for me to assume that I'll never have those two people in my personal life, so I need to blog.

I don't intend to spend hours each day blogging, but I need to blog once in a while because I need to communicate with people even if I don't know who my visitors are; or if anyone will respond to my blogs at all.  I have to communicate with the world wide web the things that I can't express on my facebook wall.  This will keep me motivated and this is how I will hold myself accountable in working towards my writing goals which is to write and publish 52 short stories in one year.  That averages out to one short story per week.

I came up with this goal after reading a blog entitled Making a Living with Your Short Fiction where Dean Wesley Smith proposes the idea that a writer can write 50 short stories (5000 words each) in a year by writing for one hour per day which equates to writing 1,000 words per day. Considering that I tend to write a lot of stories, I thought this idea was brilliant, but another kindleboards writer discussing the same blog disagreed:

...DWS assumes that right out of the gate, using only one hour a day, you’re going to write 50 short stories a year! Then you’re going to pick the best 25—a year!—and send those off. But it gets better, because by the end of year three you’ll have self-published about 100 of the 150 stories—nearly double Heinlein’s lifetime output in three years, working one hour a day—and another 50 in year 4 to bring you up to 150 published stories to Heinlein's 59.
One final bit. Ray Bradbury, one of the most prolific writers of short stories of all time, wrote around 400 stories across his whole lifetime, most of that spent as a professional, full-time writer. But DWS thinks you’re able to pull that off in six years, one hour day, starting from zero. I say bull----.

http://www.kindleboards.com/index.php/topic,117867.msg1759133.html#msg1759133

To make a long story short, the writer doesn't think its possible to write 50 shorts stories a year by writing just one hour per day —he reiterates this point in later post http://www.kindleboards.com/index.php/topic,117867.msg1759197.html#msg1759197  Furthermore, he challenged the other KB members to find someone who has made a living publishing 50 short stories per year.

I love when someone says that something within my ability (writing) is impossible.  Getting to the computer every day to type 1000 words in one hour is hard work, but its not extremely hard work given that its only one hour per day.  So I challenge myself to write and publish 50 stories in a year just writing 1000 words per day.  This is in addition to the novels that I'm working on —for those of you who keep asking me when I'm going to release another full-length novel, I'm still going to write those novels during this challenge since I'm unemployed with lots of free time.  For those of you who want to follow my fifty short story challenge, I will post daily updates of my progress on stories that I'm working on.