My 2020 challenge

Hey,

I've waited until the very last before deciding my year's resolution.

Yeah, I know. Another guy who claims he's going to do stuff and that by the end of February goes back to eat chips and stare mouth gaping at some Netflix's show.

Maybe.

Maybe I'm going to do just that.

Maybe I'm going to fail.

But you're going to be the first one to know it.

I'm going to make this a public statement. I'm going to make a promise to you, and I'm going to attach a penalty if I don't keep my promise.

Here's the deal.

I'm going to publish a story each month in 2020. It can be sudden fiction, or flash fiction. Maybe it's a fully fleshed-out short story. Perhaps it's a novella. Anything works, as long as it's published somewhere.

If a month goes by without me publishing a story, I'll donate 100 Canadian Dollars to a charity of your choosing. If I don't publish a story on another month, it's going to be another 100 dollars check I'll send.

Let me know to whom I have to send the check. You can fire me the name of the charity by answering to this email, or you reach me on social media. I'll pick one charity you suggest and will write a check. If I send it or not, it all depends on me.

Well, January is almost over, right? That means I need to get a story out ASAP.

Luckily for me, I have one ready.

You can find it at the end of this email.

The story is free, as will be all the stories that qualify in this yearly challenge.

But before, let me explain why this challenge exists.

I decided to do it after scratching off a project I have been working on for 4 months. Over 70.000 words, dumbed in the trash bin overnight. It might seem madness, but there was a reason behind it.

What I was writing was supposed to be a second book in a fantasy series. I felt the project forced from the very beginning, but I thought I needed to write a series, so I kept writing what I knew it was not meant to be written.

Two things happened at the same time that forced me to backtrack and really think about what I was doing. Nicholas Erik's daily newsletter on productivity and the craft of writing was one. The second thing was Neil Gaiman's Masterclass (I recently bought the yearly package).

I listened to Neil, and my mind slowly started absorbing a message that I knew was meant for me.

I realized writing that second book was just an excuse for me not to finish the next thing, to be stuck, to excuse myself from shipping content.

Here's the most important thing I took away from Neil's class.

He gave four simple rules for writers, some of those he took from an essay written by Heinlein. The rules are simple, they might even sound trivial, but they set my mind on fire:

Rule number one, WRITE.

Rule number two, FINISH what you write.

Rule number three, SHIP it (he said find an editor, in my case, I translate it into PUBLISH it).

Rule number four. Start the NEXT story.

I re-watched that lesson (Rules for writes) a thousand times in my mind. I realized I wasn't consistently publishing stuff since, like 2017. My latest book is my first English book, Lord of Time, which I published 5 months ago. But there wasn't going to be another book any time soon if I stubbornly kept writing a dead project.

So I sat and started thinking. I know it took me 2 years to write a 50,000 words novel in English. How long would I need to write a 5,000 words short story? I didn't know. I never tried. So I sat and wrote a 5,000 words story. It took me exactly 4 hours. The story is unpolished and rough, but it has a beginning and an end.

I was mesmerized when I found out that, when you took volume out of the equation, I was actually able to craft a decent short story in an afternoon.

The next day I sat and wrote another short story. This time I wrote 3000 words. In 2 hours. Again. It's just a draft, but it's a work with 'the end' after the full stop. I now am two stories richer than I was two days ago.

The story of this month, Glass Into Steel, was a previous unpublished work I completely rewrote and made double the original size.

I really hope you enjoy it.

If you reach the end of it, let me know what you thought of it.

Till next month,

Michele