TL;DR version: I wrote a lot of micro stories in August, and nothing else.
Not Micro Fiction
Before we talk about my micro stories, let's cover everything else I've written or intend to write:
Grandpa Anarchy Stories: I really haven't written any true (IE non-micro) Grandpa Anarchy stories in over a year. But I keep thinking I'm about to rewrite the series of stories I was most recently working on, which kind of went off in a bunch of directions and didn't seem to hold together, which is partly why I stopped working on them. (And note that I have a lot of OTHER unfinished Grandpa Anarchy stories that I intend to finish at some point, but I haven't been working on any of them.)
Fan Fiction: I have two big fan fiction stories that I intend to finish. One is a story called The Nerima All-Stars, which is very long and I've never shown to anyone outside of little bits read for my writer's group. I will probably work on this in November for NaNoWriMo, which is what I've done every November for the last 3+ years and it's still not finished. My other fan fiction story that I intend to complete, or at least work more on, is Girl's School. I've published a lot of it on Fanfiction.net and I have an Archive of Our Own account which I will eventually republish to... but nothing's there at the moment, and I'm focused on finishing Nerima All-Stars before I get back to Girl's School.
Everything Else: I do indeed have some "other" stories that fall outside of fan fiction or my Grandpa Anarchy universe stuff. I published 3-4 of these stories many years ago on a story site that I don't even remember the name of anymore. It's amazing that I even finished 3 or 4 stories, because many of these are written without a plot in mind and wind up being weird fantasy stories that go nowhere. Some of them are, in fact, just ideas, barely fleshed out, and some of them predate any of my other writing, outside of the Elfquest fan fiction and Tai-Pan stories I used to write.
However! I recently reread one of these stories titled "Lavender" for no good reason, and I'd kind of like to flesh it out and finish it and maybe publish it to AOOO or even publish on Amazon. Maybe I will?
And that reminded me that about a year ago I was plotting just such a story for possible Amazon publication. I spent more than a month working out the details of this story, and you know what? I never even wrote the basic idea down. So goodbye to that story idea, I've forgotten most of it by now.
Micro Fiction
I published 1 micro story a day for August, to Mastodon, Hive, and Tumblr. I've managed this for four months now, so that's something. I have a lot of followers and fellow writers on Mastodon, and I have a very small number of dedicated followers on Hive, and I have maybe 1-4 followers on Tumblr, which is weird because I find more writers on Tumblr (I haven't found any other writers on Hive) but that doesn't translate into people on Tumblr leaving likes, or any sign they've noticed you.
In August I managed to publish every micro story that I had written in May or June (which I had not already published).
I wrote 38 new micro stories in August (not counting prompt stories). I felt like I'd fallen off the pace, and it's true that I wrote 50 of them in July, but hey, still more than 1 per day so I think I'm doing all right.
I also wrote 92 prompt micro stories in August. These are almost entirely based on prompts from the tag #mastoprompt (one a day, published by Tanweer Dar), the tag #microprompt (published most days by Faerie) and the #writever group, a group of French short fiction writers who also publish their monthly list of prompt words in English. There is an English bot Writever Jenny, and a French counterpart named Writever Bob, and I only just noticed that these are controlled by Albert Aribaud who is the writer from that group that I follow the most. He does at least one #writever and usually one #microprompt story per day.
I also set out to write a second #writever story every day of the month based on the Aug 2022 prompt list that I'd found, but I gave up on that idea after a week, because I was already writing 3 extra stories most nights (on top of at least 1 non-prompt story per day) and trying to shoehorn in a 5th story every day was kind of insane.
Just Me Rambling About Finishing Stories for August
Sometimes I jot down a micro fiction idea and I save it as a story file, and then it's in my file of completed stories even though I haven't actually written it yet.
I had four of these last night. Given that it was the last day of August, I really wanted to complete them. I have a file folder for all of the stories I wrote in May and June (all since published) and I had a file for July and August, so I was ready to start a new file for September and October. But I felt like all my stories in the July/August file really should be finished stories.
So last night I set about to finish these.
One story, saved as "bad things" had been around for ten days. This was a partial discussion on the idea that in fairy tales bad things happen to bad people, and good things to good people. I knew there was a story to be built around that (mostly refuting the idea) but I hadn't managed to come up with it yet. So I fiddled with it for a bit, and produced what passed for a story.
Another was titled "cute". This was an idea from the day before, "an ogress who likes cute things". I was thinking about an anime character, Sakaki from Azumanga Daioh. She's tall, beautiful, athletic, and all her classmates see her as this super cool girl, but secretly she loves cute things and she's afraid what people will think if they find out. I thought, surely you can up the ante on that basic concept by making the protagonist an ogre or giant or something.
So I managed to turn that into some sort of story as well.
I had an idea I'd jotted down just a few hours earlier, "lawn ornaments", which was this: what if a wizard had hundreds of lawn ornaments, but they were all actually golems? I managed a story out of that as well.
Lastly, I had a file titled "small god" which was mostly just the phrase, "if your god fears words then he is a small god indeed." I... still haven't turned that into an actual story. :P So I have one story file from August left to finish.
