“Tim, are you almost done writing your silly stories? It’s dinner time.”
“Yep; nearly finished.”
Some time passed.
“Tim? Come on.”
“Just a minute.”
More time went by. I realized I hadn’t been nagged recently. I stepped into the kitchen. “Whoa, how long was I in there?”
“Three years.”
This is the final story of the third year of 50-word stories! I plan to finish off the week, and then take a break for some bonus guest stories while I plan out the site’s future.
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!
This coming Tuesday, July 5, marks the completion of a second full year of daily stories for FiftyWordStories.com. Join me in a big “Yay!”
So much great stuff has happened over the past year. It’s been a ton of fun. But what you want to know is what this means for the site, of course. At the end of Year One I took a bit of a hiatus to get started on putting together Fifty-Word Stories: Volume One, to recharge my creative batteries, and to make some adjustments to the website. I’m going to be doing something similar this time.
Year Two will end on Tuesday, July 5, 2011, with a final story written by me. The plan for Year Three is that it will start on Monday, August 1, 2011, though that could possibly change, depending on if I need more time to prepare. I’m going to do my best to fill the time in between with as many guest stories as possible. To that end, I have over two weeks’ worth of stories from King Kool lined up already, as well as some submissions from other writers. I’m always interested in receiving more submissions, of course!
During the hiatus, I’m going to be working hard on writing my Master’s thesis, as well as preparing Fifty-Word Stories: Volume Two for a release sometime this fall. More news on that front will become available as I continue to make progress on it.
I’m really looking forward to continuing to entertain people with my writing and the writing of all the talented people out there who have submitted guest stories over the past two years. I hope you share my enthusiasm for where the site’s been and where it’s headed!