You may not realize it, but today, February 22, 2010, marks one year since I started updating this site with a new fifty-word story every single day!

The very first “regular update” story I posted on the site was called “CPR”. If you look a little further back in the archives, you’ll see a handful of other stories which I had written before I started the site. I put those up to give people an idea of what I was going to be going for.

So at this point there are over 350 fifty-word stories on this episode, the majority of which I wrote, though many have been contributed by some great guest writers. There are also quite a few “nanofiction” stories, which are stories told in less than 140 characters so that they can be posted on Twitter.

Unfortunately, there are a few gaps in the post calendar over the past year. There have been occasional days when I haven’t gotten around to posting a story, especially recently. (In fact, yesterday and Saturday both went story-less, as you may have noticed.) Some of that has been due to busyness with other aspects of my life, and some of it has been due to a bit of waning creativity, I think. In short, I feel like I’ve been burning out very slowly…

So I’m taking a break from new daily updates. Sorry!

My first task, at this point, is going to be going back and filling in all the gaps in the calendar. If you’re following the site on Twitter (@50wordstories), the new stories should still show up there, so you’ll know as they go up. I’m going to try to keep track of the new ones as I write them, too, and then maybe make a news post with links to all the gap-fillers once I’m done.

After that, I have some ideas for maybe compiling the stories into a book, or doing something else interesting with them. I’m going to explore some options. Any feedback along these lines would be greatly appreciated.

Hmm. That was a bit of a dense newsbomb. Time for some more frivolous behaviour: YAYAYAYAYA ONE YEAR WHEEEE!!