I’m thinking of doing short interviews with people I find interesting around my neighborhood and running them. Since I can’t just sit down and bang them out in an hour, since I’d have to actually go out and do the interviews and maybe get a picture or two and then write them up, maybe one a week? I’m not committing to it, mind you, I’m just putting the idea out there that this might be coming.
After the first 9 days, I’m having a lot of fun with this. Well, 8 days of stories. I’ve learned I can go from “I have nothing to write about!” to “I can’t stop writing this story!” in about 20 minutes flat.
I’ve posted 8 stories so far; one of them, the longest, was actually written years ago and posted as-is. A total of ~17,100 words. Three of them are fantasy of various sorts, and one of those might count as horror; the other 5 are literary fiction (or fictionalized memoir-ish).
I worry about posting these since they’re first drafts. Most of them were written right up against my personal deadline of midnight in my time zone, so I don’t even get a chance to look them over for typos or obvious errors before I hit Publish. And in the back of my mind I wonder if I’m somehow wasting these ideas by putting them out there for free, when I could be polishing them and sending them off to be actually-really published somewhere, somewhere I might get paid for them.
And then I remember that ideas are cheap; it’s the doing that’s difficult. The fact that I’ve tossed so many ideas up to see what sticks in a week and a half should be testament to that. If I want to be published I just need to do what I’ve been doing daily, then take one of those a step farther. I spend between 20 minutes to an hour and a half on these; I can devote another 90 minutes, one day a week, and see what happens. That seems like an easy stretch to make.
If you’re reading this and you have strong feelings about it one way or another, or an awesome suggestion of someone I should talk to (if you’re local) or a story idea (no matter where you are), leave that in the comments.