Shortly after Christmas last year, still dealing with the fact that we cancelled Jane’s family Christmas due to COVID-19, I discovered that the writer Dean Wesley Smith was running a sale on his courses to help writers during the pandemic, among them was The Great Challenge.
The challenge was to write a short story every week for a year.
52 stories.
Now, I write a lot – not as much as some, but tonnes compared to the majority of traditionally published authors. But the thought of taking on the challenge appealed to me, especially after a weird year.
At this point, I might add that I found 2020 to be a fascinating year – difficult, yes, but fascinating – largely because I read David Quammen’s excellent nonfiction book Spillover in November and December 2019, and then suddenly, damn me if it didn’t come true! I honestly think that book helped me get through the year, just like watching the film Contagion did – an earlier favourite of mine, pre-pandemic and also frighteningly prescient. I should add that I’m not blind to the horror of COVID-19, but reading that book allowed me to take a step to one side and to think of the virus as a living thing, and the challenges of stopping it.
But I digress.
I was looking for a different kind of challenge, and I found one.
I started in the first week of January this year, and have hit the short story a week every week alongside my other projects. Sometimes I wished I didn’t have to write another short story but I did, every week.
Some of the stories have been Christoffer Petersen stories, others by other pen names such as Bran Nicholls. In addition to the fun of writing stories, I’ve had a blast making the covers for them too.
This week will be number 46.
A new story, a new cover, and a new pen name – this one’s secret, the second of my secret pen names. 😉
I’m getting there.
Chris
I planned to wait until this Sunday, but decided to tease the release today. And I say tease as there’s not much I want to say at the moment, and certainly no spoilers. But, for the sake of saying something, I should add that I’m working on an Advent story to be released each Advent Sunday this Christmas.
Denmark has, in my opinion, one of the best library systems in the world. I’m not sure “systems” is the right word, but everything is connected. All the libraries are connected. I can order something from the database, and it might be plucked from the Royal Danish Air Force library and sent to my local library to be picked up. I’ve ordered articles from old newspapers and a librarian scans it and sends me the PDF. I can watch 100 films or documentaries every month, and borrow the DVDs of those films not available for streaming. CDs, board games, computer games – anything you want, and more, when you’re not careful. Like the time I thought it would be interesting to read Sir Richard Burton’s notes from 1001 Arabian Nights. Well, they arrived, all 13 volumes, but they were so old I had to read them at the library.
The publishing world has changed drastically since the advent of eBooks. There are thousands of articles and blog posts about the changes, and I’m not going to recap any of them here. But what I will say, as an independent author, is the smartest thing I ever did when flirting with the traditional publishing world was to keep my English rights for the books they were interested in.
When I’m not “here” I like to think I’m somewhere in the far north. And, while Greenland is very dear to me, so is Canada and Alaska, and the Yukon in particular. So here’s a quick post to keep the streak going. We had lot of wildlife encounters during our two month trip down the Yukon, and this is just one of them.