Sunday, October 1, 2023

September Wrapup

 I wrote 117 micro stories in September - 41 for my daily post and 76 prompt stories (total may include 5 #writever prompt stories that I plan to write today to catch up, since I've fallen behind on those).


I am still posting stories that I wrote in July, although sometimes something new strikes me as particularly good and I post it quickly.  Usually I'm right.  ^_^


This month I got my first truly viral story post, I think.  For me anything that garners more than 50 likes is fairly viral, and a couple of stories have racked up well over 100 likes.  But a story I posted on Sept 3 has had 340 likes and 195 boosts, easily the most popular thing I've posted.  I think it got about 12 likes on Hive too, which is pretty big for me there.


And... I was a bit mystified as to why.  It's a story about angelic beings, and one accidentally deletes the world he's been working on, and his backup is old.  It was kind of a silly story to me, one that I waited a long time to post.  Usually I can say:  Oh, this story is about working for exposure, that's why it struck a chord with people.  But this time I can only surmise that a lot of people have feelings about accidentally deleeting something, and maybe the idea of it being a planet was kind of novel.  ^_^


I am still trying to post 1 story a day + a #writever prompt story + a #mastoprompt story, and a #microprompt story if those prompts appear, which they haven't for almost two weeks.  (Four stories a day is a bit much - I'm kind of relieved when I can skip one!  Although I worry about my friend who was posting them.) 


NaNoWriMo is coming up, and I want to work on my long-suffering fanfiction story Nerima All-Stars again.  It will be interesting trying to juggle that with writing micro fiction stories.  I may give up on doing the prompt stories for November.


I also joined Bluesky (@vanellopemint.bsky.social).  They have a 300 character limit, and so most of my micro fiction won't fit that format, but I've figured out that I can post a screen capture of my Mastodon story post, and then copy/paste the entire text of the story into Alt Text for anyone who can't see the image.  That works, so I've been doing that a week and... so far, very little engagement, but I know some of my friends are reading, and some random people come across my stories too.  Mostly I feel like Bluesky is a chance for me to follow the notable people I liked to follow on Twitter, and hopefully when it goes completely public it will become a Twitter killer.  We'll see.  But it's still a corporate site run by people who don't care about you.