Monday, December 3, 2012

2013 Goal #4: Read 500 Short Stories

I'm going to be working out my 2013 goals publicly here on my blog over the next couple of months. Note that all of these posts will be considered "First Draft" goals, subject to being modified, enhanced, shrunk, contorted, folded, spindled, mutilated, or even out-and-out obliterated at my own future whim. These goals are also being presented simply in the order that I decide upon them. So Goal #1 isn't any more important than Goal #5 (or whatever). I probably will reorder the goals in order of importance when I go to wrap this all together in a final set of 2013 goals.
2013 Writing Goal #4: Read 500 Short Stories and Document What I've Read

As I've discussed in several recent blog posts, my focus as a writer is primary around short fiction (For the purposes of this goal I'm using "short stories" to cover everything shorter than a novel, from flash fiction to novellas.) One of the things which I can do to improve my abilities as a writer of short fiction is to be an avid reader of short fiction.

When I say that I'll document what I read, I pretty much just mean note what I read, who wrote it, and where I read it. I'll also make some kind of notation if it's a story which I want to keep track of for award nomination purposes. That will not be public documentation; just a spreadsheet or something like that which I keep for my own use.

I've occasionally set myself short fiction reading goals and there for a while I was doing a very good job of taking part in #storyeachnight on Twitter. (Exactly what it sounds like, read a story every day and tweet about it.) This goal is a bit more ambitious than a story a day; a little more than four stories every three days. But it's the sort of thing I shouldn't have any real difficulty with as long as I keep reading at a steady pace.

3 comments:

  1. Very cool goal, Michael! Looking forward to seeing your updates throughout the year.

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  2. To help you achieve that, I wonder if you have checked out ReadWave.com before? You see, I help out on there and we've just launched a "reading widget" (a tool which allows you to embed a story on your website in a very compact form) which is aimed at bloggers who love short stories. Since you like both and because you seem like a nice person, I was hoping I could ask you to check it out and let me know what you think of it? Here's a link to our Blogspot (readwave.blogspot.co.uk) where you can see a demonstration of how to do so. For the site page, it’s here (http://readwave.com)

    At the moment we're still looking for feedback on how easy it is to use the feature, and how useful you think it would be, so if you are able to test it out on your blog I would be eternally grateful. Please do get in touch.

    All the best,
    Nyasha

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