Micro Stories

 I've started writing micro stories.  I'm posting one a day to my Mastodon account, @vanellopemint@home.social.  (I recently found out that home.social may close down this year.  :(  It seemed like such a stable instance!)

Anyway, I've been fascinated by microfiction for quite a while.  For years I've followed two accounts on Twitter that write within the 280-character Twitter limit, @microflashfic and @microsff.  The first account posted several times a day for over a year.  They've both collected into books, I believe.

I wanted to try doing this as well, but I was intimidated by writing a story within the 280 character limit.  It seemed like a very daunting task, an amazing trick.  I do write a lot of short stories -- usually 1,000 to 2,000 words -- but writing such a tiny story seemed impossible.

After the Musk invasion of Twitter, I moved to Mastodon where @microsff@mastodon.art also posts, and I followed several hashtags, #microfiction, #flashfiction, and #smallstories and discovered other people who do this, including @humpbuckletales@mastondon.social, @idle@writing.exchange and @neverworn@social.retrodon.net.  Mastodon allows for 500 characters which seemed more do-able to me.

On Monday May 1st I tried again to imagine a micro story, but came up with nothing.  I went to bed, and an idea finally popped into my head.  I got up and wrote a 200-word story involving Grandpa Anarchy, the hero I've written many stories about.  I was really proud of this -- I'd found one definition of micro fiction online that set the limit at 300 words or less.  But then I realized my 200-word story was over 1,200 characters -- far too long to fit into a Mastodon post.  So I went back to bed.

And then!  I got another idea for a very short story.  I got up and wrote it and published it, and I was very proud of myself.  I thought:  I can do this!

Carlos beheld a beautiful woman in flowing robes.  "I was struck by bus..."

"While saving someone," she said.  "It often happens."

His eyes widened.  "You're an isekai reincarnation goddess?"

She smiled.  "I send people into new worlds on new adventures."

"Like a Game Master who decides everyone's fate."  He sighed.  "I ran RPGs.  I'll miss that."

"But I never get my own adventure," she added.  "Unless...."

"Yes?"

"How would you like to be the new God of Second Chances...?"

The next day, I managed to write three more while at work.  I thought:  Hey, this isn't so hard!  I could maybe publish once a week!

The day after that, I wrote 8-9 more, and I realized I should probably try posting one story a day for the month of May.  So I posted two that night to catch up.

Thursday i wasn't able to write anything.  I had one idea in my head most of the day -- about vampires and garlic.  Why do they hate garlic?  It turns out one possible reason is that people thought vampirism was a disease of the blood, and garlic has antimicrobial abilities.  In other words, there's no intrinsic reason why vampires would hate garlic.

That seemed like good story material.  I could imagine a vampire that loves garlic bread, for example.  But I couldn't manage to turn that into a story.

In the evening I watched the rest of season 3 of Lower Decks, and that gave me ideas that also went nowhere.  Later I was trying to work out a story involving the plethora of secret organizations that supposedly rule the world from the shadows -- surely there was a joke in there somewhere that I could tell.

Maybe this is not as easy as I thought?

I woke up at 1:30 AM, and the idea for the story popped into my head, based on secret societies.  I immediately got up and jotted down the idea, lay back down, got back up and wrote the idea out, lay back down, got up and rework/edit more than once.  Finally I went back to sleep.

In the morning on the way to work I came up with another.  So!  Not so difficult after all!  That's one story for Thursday and one for Friday.  One a day is all I need to keep up.  ^_^

I've managed at least one micro story a day since -- sometimes 2-3.  At this point I'm 10 days in and I've written about 24 stories, so I'm well on my way to doing one a day for at least a month.  I can probably do this for several months at least.  Could I do it for a full year?  I guess we'll find out.  ^_^

Some are better than others.  One story I posted late last week got about 25 likes/boosts.  This counts as viral for me on Mastodon.  :D  I was lucky that a person with a large following boosted me, and that exposed me to many more people than normal.

You might not think 24 likes sounds like much, but when I was lying on my bed my desktop computer would beep, followed by my iPad, my iPhone, and then the old iPhone that I use for playing Pokemon Go.  So it was a lot of beeps each time someone liked and boosted.  ^_^

"Become a hero?" the girl exclaimed.  "Defeat the Dark Lord?  No thanks!  I'd rather run a bookstore!"

As she left, Miardolyn the wizard said, "Apologies, Lord.  Summoning an otherworldly hero who truly wishes to be one is daunting."

Lord Danozlan nodded.  "The previous one became a cook."

"Do not despair, Lord!" Miardolyn drew a new circle.  "I shall try yet again!"

"Please," said the Dark Lord.  "If we find not a hero to defeat me, I must conquer the world.  Who wants that?"

I average 2-4 likes/boosts per post.  But a story I posted a few days later got no likes or boosts until near the end of the day, when my friend Matt liked it.  Well at least I know someone looked at it!  The story I posted the next morning had several likes/boosts in the first hour so I know people are reading, just not every one is a banger.

I've cross-posted some of them to Hive Social as well.  Maybe I should post to Tumblr.  I haven't left Twitter completely but I refuse to post there anymore.

In other writing news, I wrote very little Grandpa Anarchy fiction last year.  In November I worked on my fan fiction novel called The Nerima All-Stars.  Afterwards, I decided to give up on writing Grandpa Anarchy stories and try to finish my novel instead.  That... hasn't happened.  I've got a bit of writing on it done in the past few months, but not as much as I'd like.  I wrote only a couple of scenes in April, I think.