Tuesday, August 29, 2017

One Year of Stories!

A year ago in August 2016, I was in a Tai-Pan meeting where we were discussing the end of our regular zine publishing, and what we would do in the future with new stories (which... I always have intended to work on, but mostly haven't in the last couple of years.)  The answer was that we could just publish stories online, which is kind of how things are done these days anyway -- very few people in fandom produce printed zines.

Anyway, this kind of led to an epiphany for me:  why can't I just start publishing Grandpa Anarchy stories online?  Originally I had intended to assemble enough short stories to fill a book (which I still intend to publish), and I had never really intended to publish any of those stories online first -- but by 2016 I had enough short stories completed to fill about six books, and I was still writing more.  There was no reason I couldn't say, "From this moment forward, I'll publish any new stories I write online."

This was an idea I'd had in the back of my head for a long time, but on that day in August I realized that I should stop thinking about it and just do it.  I went home and researched what kind of web sites I could assemble easily with a service like Squarespace, and then I decided that, really, Google's Blogspot did just about everything I needed anyway.  It was simplicity itself to set up a new blog for my Grandpa Anarchy stories -- the hard part was making sure I had a new story written to publish every week.

I've mostly been really good at doing that.  I haven't always published on Monday as promised, but I've managed a new story every week for a full year.  At this point I've published 65 stories, and most of those (about 50 total) were newly written since I started.  I've published one "classic" story a month (although I forgot to do this for August 2017 -- or did I?  I published two stories last week, and they were both "classic" in the sense that I wrote them before August 2016.)  On a few other occasions I've published older stories that seemed to fit a theme:  a ghost story around Halloween, the two stories last week to coincide with the eclipse.

I'm happy that I've been able to keep publishing new stories every week.  It was a nice goal and it's kept me from getting too lazy about my writing.  Some stories are better than others, it's hard to make them all work really well when I'm under pressure to publish something each week.  The blog is pretty small in the grand scope of things -- recently I've been getting 25-30 views per post, with a high of 38.  When I started out I was lucky to get a dozen views.  ^_^  Mostly I enjoy the challenge to keep writing something new each week.

Currently I'm working on a story about a villain called the Malevolent Marketeer, and one about a washed-up villain that Grandpa decides to help out over the protests of his sidekick.  I've only written 1 or 2 stories for the month of August.  I have 7 stories in the queue not including the one I'm publishing for this week, so right now I'm looking okay -- not as far ahead as I'd like, but not in panic-mode either.  Hopefully I can get at least one of the two above stories finished this week and not fall further behind.

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