FiftyWordStories.com Year Three starts tomorrow. I’ll be kicking off the year with a week of stories written by myself, and following that we’ll go back to Monday guest stories and my writing on Tuesday to Friday.

I’m really looking forward to this year. I felt like last year’s schedule, where I was writing four stories a week instead of seven, really brought up the average quality of my writing. More overall practice with the format helped too, of course!

There are a couple of small site tweaks I want to point out. First is that there’s a new Stories page that you can use to browse through the kinds of stories you want to read. I’ve gone back through the entire archives of the site and separated the stories into thematic categories, like I do with the books, so hopefully that will make it easier to find what you’re looking for. You can also just read Guest stories, or use the Search tool in the sidebar.

On another topic, I’m hoping to have Volume Two ready for ordering by the end of August. I still have work to do on the layout, the cover, and the bonus content. More details will be forthcoming over the next few weeks. I’m hoping to have a few other things available, too; there’s been talk of story-based t-shirts and fridge magnets going around “the office.” Those things will depend on cost, practicality, and interest levels, so if there’s something you’d really like to see, let me know with a comment or an email (tim@fiftywordstories.com).

Due to the improvements in story quality, I actually have almost 130 stories picked out for inclusion in Fifty-Word Stories: Volume Two, compared to the 100 in Volume One. That means that even though I wrote fewer stories, more of them were good enough to put in the book, which is pretty cool, in my opinion.

Let’s have a bigger year than ever, and kick things off with a really fun August. Read, rate, comment, and submit!