Story list update

Back in March, I gave the random tip to keep track of everything you can for your writing.  To recap my situation, in Excel I had a Submission List where I kept track of every story I submitted, where, when, when I heard back, and when/if it was published.  I also had a Publication List, that listed in order each of my published stories, but I only counted the first time they were published.  This list also had a one sentence outline for each story to make it easier for me to find them since I’ll remember that I wrote a story about X, but can’t remember what title I gave for it.  Nice and straight forward, except my numbers didn’t match, and there were other things I wanted to keep track of.  After putting off making a new list for years, I finally decided to do it, and part of the reason for that post was to make myself do it.  Well, I didn’t expect to finish this new list so soon, but I’ve had some internet issues, so instead of spending hours watching YouTube videos, I worked on these new lists.

Anyway, while working on the new lists, I realized that I actually had a third list of my stories.  On my website I like to have a little blurb about my stories and a link to them if they are online.  Turns out, between the three lists, I had just about every mistake option.  There were stories on my Submission List that weren’t on my Publication List and vice versa.  And I had stories on my lists that weren’t on my website, and even one story on my website, but not on either list.  (That’s an interesting tale, but for another day.) But after countless hours of work, I can say that my new Submission List, my new Publication List, and my website are all in agreement, more or less.  There are a couple stories missing from my website, but they were first posted on websites that no longer exist and have been posted elsewhere, or in one case is a story I don’t really like that is still up on a dying website.  And there could be some fundamental flaw in my lists, but to the best of my knowledge I’ve covered everything.

So what did I find out?  Well, as of the posting of this blog, “Old Story” is my 679th published story.  My most recent publication is a reposting of the story “Worst Foot Forward,” which marks my 243rd reposting of a story.  Now, some of these reposted stories have been reposted three, four, and I think in one case even five times as they made the circuit of dying websites.  I haven’t worked out exactly how many of my stories I’ve reposted, but if for some reason I ever wanted to, I could figure it out.  Part of the reason I got around to finally redoing these lists, is because I jokingly thought that the reason I was able to publish so many stories is because half of them were under 500 words.  Well, now I know that 429, or over 63% of my published stories are under 500 words.  The full numbers are, I have 39 stories of 100 words or less, 155 between 101-250 words, 235 between 251-500 words, 116 between 501-750 words, 57 between 751-1,000 words, 59 between 1,001-2,500 words, 12 between 2,501-5,000 words, 4 between 5,001-10,000 words, and two over 10,001 words.  If you’re curious, my shortest story at only 20 words is “Never Done,” which is on a dying website and some may find in poor taste.  My longest story is “Relics” at 15,794 words, which some may also find in poor taste.

The other things I’ve found out, is that 612 of my stories, or 90.1%, were published by me, while 30, or 4.4% were published on a friend’s website or by a writing group I was a part of.  The remaining 37 or 5.4% were published by someone else.  The total number of words in all my published stories (using the word length of the most recent reposting) is 428,857 words.  I also have been keeping track of how many words I write each day for the past twenty years, and that stands at just over 863,000.  Meaning there are over 434,000 words that I’ve either cut from stories or are in stories I’ve started but never finished.   

Stories weren’t the only things I kept lists on, since I also dabble a bit in poetry.  These are mostly haiku, but there are a few non-rhyming poems thrown in.  Again, I had a Submission List, Publication List, and my Website list, and even though I do far less poetry than stories, these were somehow even more out of whack.  I had haiku on my website that didn’t show up on either list, and haiku on at least one list but not on my website.  It felt like it took just as long for me to hammer it all into shape as it did my stories. 

My most recent new poetry publication, is the haiku “the rich get richer” which is my 132nd poem.  My most recent poem publication is the reposting of “Stealer of Daylight,” which is my 35th poem repost.  Of my published poems, 116, or 87.9% are haiku, while the other 16, or 12.1%, are non-rhyming.  I’ve published 129, or 97.7% of my poems, 1, or 0.8%, were published by a writing group I was in, and the other 2, or 1.5%, were published by someone else.

So that is the update on my story/poem lists.  But it’s not the end.  When I decided to write a quick outline for my published stories so I could find them easier, I also realized I should do that for my unpublished stories.  Sometimes I’ll remember that I started a story about X, but can’t remember how far I got with it.  So I have an Unpublished List, that has the title or working title, what type it likely is – be it a short story, or more like a novella which also indicates which folder I have it in – as well the brief outline.  I set all this up, and kept it updated for a while, but I haven’t done such a good job for the past year or so.  Which means my next project will be sorting all that out and getting it up to date.  Which will be annoying because I’ll be revisiting all these stories that held so much promise, but I never got around to finishing.  Joy.

Random Writing Tips – Keep track of inspirations

 

Last month, I gave the tip of Keep track of everything, in regards to the submission and publications of your stories.  I think that idea of keeping track of things stuck in my mind, and when I had a random memory of something, the two clicked together and I had a tip for this month.

Many years ago, on the Discovery Channel, or Science Channel, or some such channel, they would have these random specials.  They would ask something like, “What if an alien probe showed up at Earth?” and then they would construct a fictional story about this idea where they could sprinkle in some actual scientists to explain some specific idea.  I would watch these specials, but mostly for the science.  The fictional aspects of them I usually found … bland or stupid.  I think I just watched them to see what not to do in my own stories.

For example, there was one where a small black hole was heading towards Earth.  We figured out something was up because there came this huge wave of comets kicked out of the Oort Cloud, and we eventually figured out it had to be a black hole that would enter the solar system in like, fifty years.  Humanity rushes to build an ark for some 10,000 survivors or so to escape to another star system.  They do escape, just as the black hole eats a large chunk of the Earth.

I only roughly remember the plot for this – I believe a subplot is some billionaires didn’t want to risk being left behind in the lottery for the survivors, so they use their money to build an anti-matter drive ship which explodes on the launch pad – but to me it seemed every choice they made was the wrong one.  So for the next few weeks, I tried to work out the “better” way to deal with this random, very specific situation.  And then, like most things, I eventually set it aside and it just became a dim memory rarely remembered.  I could explain what I remember of my idea, but it basically boils down to instead of building one giant ark to escape to another solar system, they should have built hundreds or thousands of smaller ships and start sending them out to the outer parts of our solar system as soon as they were finished.  Then, after the black hole passed through, they could return to the inner solar system to either recolonize it, or to gather the resources to build the ark. 

Anyway, the reason I bring all this up, is that over the years I’ve tried to look up the original show to see how accurate my memory of it is.  But I can’t remember the title of it, what channel it aired on, or even what year it aired.  And even when Google gave you actual results, instead of pointless ads or AI slop, I couldn’t find it, so I have no idea how to find it now.  So my writing tip is, if you ever come across something that sparks an idea for you, maybe make a note of it.  Because there’s a chance twenty years later you’ll want to look it up for some reason, but won’t have any luck.

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Image from Pixabay.

Writing Newsletter First Quarter 2026

 

As I said in My writing plans for 2026, instead of trying to write a story each month for my website, I’d only do one each quarter.  The story for this quarter was “Keep Writing,” which I almost didn’t finish in time.  I started another story, but it turned out to be too big for me, so I had to set it aside and then scramble to come up with something else.  But I did manage to do it.

As I also said in my plans, I was only going to post one story each quarter on my blog, and I came up with a story, but then things happened so I had to delay posting it until the second quarter.  So I had a story for the second quarter, and I had to scramble to get one for the first quarter, which I did with “Still Relevant.”

I wanted to post a story on Ko-fi and Buy Me a Coffee, but I didn’t get to it.  I did start a story for Buy Me a Coffee, but in the scramble of the last few weeks of the quarter, as well as yard and garden work, and a collapsing society, I didn’t get to finish it.  But that just means I already have a story mostly done for the second quarter.

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It seems so easy a task to keep track of how many microfictions and haikus I post, but I keep forgetting to mark what I’ve done, and then I get confused trying to go back and recount them.  So moving forward, I’ll just say that I’ve posted some of each, and if you really want to know how many there were, you can count them yourself on my Untitled Works Page and my Haiku Page.

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And I think that’s it.  With everything going on in the world, trying to get my garden stuff ready for spring, and a few mild illnesses, I really haven’t had time to do much writing.  Will that change?  We’ll just have to wait and see.

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – Keep track of everything

 

I’ve been submitting/self-publishing stories for just over twenty years.  I think at first, I just kept track of things in a notebook, but I eventually decided to make an Excel document to keep track of everything.  I had the story’s title, where I submitted it, when I submitted it, when I heard back, and what the result was.  Later, I started keeping track of the stories that were published.  I did this by numbering them in the order they were published, as well as turning their entry red.  The importance of the numbering is that sometimes I’d submit a story somewhere and not hear back for over a month, during which time I was posting stories each week on my website. 

This worked well for years, but then I had a problem.  I’ve published hundreds of stories on my webpage – most are only a few hundred words – and I don’t remember them all.  One time I remembered writing a story about, I don’t know, aliens landing at Mardi Gras, but I couldn’t remember what the title was.  So I scrolled through story after story, until I finally found … “Party Planet,” or whatever.  Knowing that something similar would eventually happen again, I decided it would be nice to have, not detailed descriptions of every story, but something like “Aliens land at Mardi Gras,” which I could quickly search for and find. 

The easy thing to do would be to just add this on to the existing list, but I figured it would be nice to have a list of just my published stories in the order they were published.  I got to work and soon had a list, and then I had to go to the story, refamiliarize myself with it, then write up a blurb.  And that should have been it.

Unfortunately, I made a mistake somewhere.  Well, a couple of mistakes.  Like, #500 on my Submissions List is #502 on my Publications List.  But, #400 is #399, and #300 is #301.  This isn’t a new problem.  I made my Publications List several years ago, so I’ve known of this mismatch.  Unfortunately, fixing this issue is #439 on my “It would be nice to do this someday list,” and I have a thousand things on my, “I should do list,” not to mention the thousand things on my, “To do list.”

A couple years ago, when I was getting close to publishing my 600th story, I figured I should go through and find my mistakes to know which story it was.  But life happened and I never did.  And now I’m inching closer to Number 700, and I figured I should really get to it, this time.  For sure.  Part of my forcing myself to do this, was to write this post about the importance of keeping track of your stories.  I could explain the issues I have, and then in a few months I can do an update about how I finally sat down and did the work and can finally say exactly how many stories I’d published.   

Well, I have starting redoing both lists.  I’m redoing both to make sure I don’t miss anything.  I’ve barely started, and I’ve already found a couple mistakes.  I have no idea how long this project will take, because I’m also doing something else.  In an early draft of this post, I mentioned that I had published over 600 stories, and while that sounds impressive, probably half of them are under 500 words.  And then I realized it would be nice to know how many of stories are under 500 words, or over 5,000 or whatever category I want to put them in.  So now I’m redoing both lists, and then also hunting down the stories and seeing how long they are.  This is a project I’ll slowly be working on for months.  Will I finish it before #700?  Only time will tell. 

So if you’re a beginning writer, I’d say start keeping track of everything you can, because someday you’ll wish you had.  And going back to do it all later can be super annoying.

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Image from Pixabay.

Writing in these dark times

I’m trying to write more microfiction stories.  For one, I can post them on Mastodon or Bluesky making them a nice way for people to find out about me (here is a page with all the ones I’ve published) and two, I’m slowly working on a collection of 1,001 microfiction stories, and it takes some time to write that many.  Last week I came up with an idea dealing with the current state of the world, when I ran into a wall, and I haven’t quite figured out how to move on.

The idea for the story is pretty simple.  Some guy is at home on the couch when someone bangs on the door – instead of using the doorbell – and shouts, “ICE, open up.” The guy gets up, starts recording on his phone, and opens the inner door.  Outside the screen door is some masked asshole in camo, but before he could say anything, the owner says, “Fuck off.  I don’t want any of your Fascist Scout Cookies.” He then slams the door as hard as he could.

I came up with the idea, and hoped it would bring a smile to someone’s face.  And then I ran into the reality wall.  Because, as a white guy from Pennsylvania, I – possibly – could get away saying something like that to the Istapo.  But Juanita from Puerto Rico?  She’d probably be pulled through the screen door, or maybe just shot. 

I live in the middle of nowhere, in a very red part of Pennsylvania.  So there’s little chance I’ll have a run in with ICE.  And I’m broke, so I can’t really support financially those that are standing up to these goons.  For the longest time, I thought my role would be writing stories making fun of the fascist assholes, or stories set in a better world that we could aspire towards.  That’s great and all, but it really feels like it’s not enough.  Or worse, what if the next ICE execution video we see is someone saying, “I don’t want any of your Fascist Scout Cookies,” before slamming the door as the goon goes into hyper-rage.  That would destroy me. 

And that’s where I am right now.  I want to write to help the cause, but I don’t know what I can write that could help.  And my normal stories of aliens and time travel just feel, at best, pointless and at worst, a distraction. 

My writing plans for 2026

In 2025, my basic writing plan was to post a story each month on my website, one each month on one of my blogs, and one each quarter on my Ko-fi page.  That works out to seven stories every three months.  Not all of these stories were new, but still it turned out to be a lot.  I ended up missing a few months from general writing burnout, as well as stress from my personal life as well as the general collapse of society.  So for 2026, I’m going to make a bit of a change.  The first is I’m stopping doing a story each month on my website, and instead will only do one each quarter.  I’ll also only do a story each quarter on one of my blogs as well as on Ko-fi.  I’m also planning on trying to do a story each quarter on my Buy Me A Coffee page.  I set this up years ago, but never did anything with it.  But on the off chance I might make a few bucks off it, I figured I’d try it out.  So instead of working on seven stories each three months, I’ll only have to do four.  Hopefully, this will lead to better quality as well as less stress.  As well as more time for me to work on other projects.

One of my goals for 2025 was to finish up my Lunar Dreams project, which is essays on how we could colonize the moon.  I, unfortunately, didn’t get much done with this.  Besides all the drama of a collapsing society, there was also the point that I originally planned to release it on Amazon.  But in the last few years, it seems fewer people are buying books from Amazon.  I understand that, but it also sucks because that’s were all my books are.  I need to diversify, and I have checked out Draft2Digital, but I’d like to test the waters a bit before launching a big project there.  So my plan for 2026 is to self-publish two stories on Draft2Digital and see how they go before deciding if I want to do Lunar Dreams there.  These two stories I wrote years ago, but there are some clunky bits I need to hammer out before I post them. 

Those are my plans for 2026.  Hopefully, by the end of the year we’ll have stopped our slide into darkness.  I don’t want my plans for 2027 to just be to survive.