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.