Wow, it doesn’t feel like six months, but it’s the end of June, and last week I sent you the 13th story in this project of mine. Here are some observations from my first six months of work as a producing-on-a-schedule short story writer:
1) The ideas are not the problem (at least so far). I wondered if I’d have trouble thinking of story ideas. So I started a note on my phone where I’d write down every short story idea I could think of, no matter how dumb they sounded.
After six months, I’ve got easily two years worth of ideas, and more come to me all the time. Will they all work? Certainly not. But at least to this point, I can generate short story ideas a lot faster than I can write short stories. That’s a big relief.
2) There’s nothing wrong with last-minute. I started this with “I’m never going to leave it until the last day and be writing in a hurry".” Well, like so many things I promise I’ll “never” do, the whole reason it’s even coming up is that I know, somewhere in my mind, that it’s exactly what I’ll do! I’m never going to orbit Neptune, but I don’t feel the need to make that clear, because it’s not in anybody’s mind (including mine) that I ever would do that!
Happily, the stories I’ve produced in a single day have been some of the best-received I’ve done (the poems do tend to take quite a bit longer). I enjoy working ahead; it’s certainly a more fun and relaxed experience for me (and I do have a couple of “emergency” stories banked as an insurance policy, which helps take pressure off), but there does not seem to be a necessary compromise of quality just because I leave a story for Saturday. Trenchant observation: 20 years of intensive writing practice will make you faster at writing!
3) Setting myself up for embarrassment helps me be productive. This is hardly universal (even within my own life), but in this case, I don’t think I’d have written more than 1-2 of these stories this year if I hadn’t committed myself to publishing every 2 weeks and told everyone I know to tell everyone they know that I was doing it. Now it feels real, and urgent, and like I’m going to be a big, fat failure if I just stop and don’t get it done. Again, not the kind of pressure I’d have wanted to put on myself at the beginning, but with a skill set in place, the discomfort of it is a kick in the butt!
4) People like the stories a lot more than the interstitial pieces. This is a “thank goodness”, cause otherwise I’d feel like I should hang up writing and be a blogger, but my original stories tend to get 2-3x the engagement that these other pieces get. I’ve considered just doing a story every week, but 1) No. 2) Um, hell no. 3) I really enjoy writing the reviews and things and trying to be funny, and I think it’s good proof-of-concept for writing I’d like to do in the future, so I’m going to keep at it. But, I’m going to focus most of my effort on the stories, feel free to do short, easy pieces and recommendations in the weeks between, and just try to keep it all fun.
5) I’m bad at telling which stories people will like the most. This is very interesting and surprising to me, but the ones I’ve gotten the most positive feedback on (which often comes in the form of email replies rather than public comments) are not necessarily my favorites, and definitely not the ones I’ve worked the longest on or agonized the most over. Intuition is often deceptive!
6) Promotion remains elusive and not natural for me. I had a nice burst of subscriber growth at the beginning, and I’ve had a trickle since then, and that’s actually fine. This is an ongoing project, if it takes some time to build a large audience, no big deal, tons of great things started that way.
What frustrates me more is it feels like there are a lot of low-hanging (or at least reachable) promotional fruit I could be picking, and I’m just not doing as much of it as I’d like to. I love the writing, and I actually love doing promotional stuff, like when I’ve appeared on podcasts and given interviews and things. It’s fun! What I don’t enjoy is the social media discipline and the asking people to let me on their podcasts and the logistics and grind of it all.
That said, I need to do more of it, and I want to do more of it, because I’m really proud of what I’m doing here, and I want more people who love sci fi to know about it. So I want to publicly commit myself to trying to do more. I will do another “Reflects” post at the end of the year, and hopefully by that point I will have found more time, energy, and willingness to consistently let the public know what I’m doing here, as futile and frustrating as that process can sometimes be in today’s attention economy.
7) I’m incredibly grateful for all of you. It’s still the case with my project that a measurable percentage of the people reading are blood-related or close personal friends of mine. Most of the others are only a couple steps removed from that group. I’m certainly hoping that my readership expands significantly in the months and years to come. But right now, in this moment, it seems so completely worth the work to do it just for this select, special group of readers. Thanks you SO much for reading and sharing my work, outside of my family it is literally the most important thing in my life, and when people support it, I feel seen and valued and safe.
Thank you so much for reading! And, if you want to help me get a head start on promotion, you can share my work with others. Or, if you know someone who has a podcast that invites guests on, please ask them to consider me! I can fit into almost any format, I promise, and it would be an incredible help.
I’ll see you next Sunday with another original story. Have a great week!