OGWiseman Reflects!
One year of OGWiseman's Stories... and a lot of new things to come next year!
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone! I hope there’s cheer and joy and safety and love where you are. I just finished hosting Christmas in my own home for the first time ever, and it was lovely.
About fifty-one weeks ago, I set out to write 26 short stories this year, and tell a lot of people I was doing it. Because of time/energy constraints and my natural disaffinity for self-promotion, I haven’t told as many people as I should have. That’s something I plan to change in 2022! The stories, however, got written.
That’s 26 stories—Six poems and 21 prose stories—averaging 3,182 words each, for a total of 82,736 words. An average book runs 80-100k words (with a ton of variance), so if you read every story I’ve written this year (and I know there were a few of you all-stars who did, thank you so much!), then you’ve read a book’s worth of my work this year. That’s very exciting to me!
Next year:
I plan to write 26 more stories. That will stay the core of this project, and I have enough ideas in my notebook to fill an entire year already, although I’m sure most of them will be ideas I haven’t thought of yet. That’s part of what’s so exciting about this!
I plan to promote a lot more and a lot more diversely. I moved to a new state, bought a house, planned a multi-day wedding for 150+ people, and got married in 2021. I don’t have to do that again! Hoping that will leave me more energy to get out of my comfort zone and promote.
I plan to introduce an audio component to this project—both in terms of making the stories available as audio books (including the back catalog) and (in time) an interview and podcast component.
Thank you all SO much for coming on this journey with me, for sharing my stories on your social media or with friends you think might be interested, and for your notes of encouragement and support along the way. Writing these stories has been very meaningful to me, and it’s one of the many things I’m deeply grateful for as 2021 crashes to an end.
To close this year, I’d like to share a couple of my early stories, ones I particularly love. Lots of people joined my readership partway through the year. If you’re one of them and you haven’t had the chance yet, I (obviously) recommend going back and checking these out.
Here’s the first story I published for this project, “Favorite of the Gods”:
And here is the first poem I did, called “Endless Visions”. When I wrote this it poured out in a hurry, and it really shaped what I wanted to do with and thought I could get out of this project. The response from many people to this poem via email and social media was really encouraging:
I hope you all have a safe and merry close to the year, and I will be back next Sunday with my first short story of 2022!