So, I have 8 days to write a 5,000 word short story.  That’s the equivalent of about 10 of my “Tiny Fictions”.  In that same time, I’m going to be starting constuction on the loft.

It’s possible I may miss my goal for one short story a month.  We’ll see. I actually have an idea and the basic outline of a story in my head, I just need to get started and get words on paper (so to speak).

We’ll see…

I created a page to track my goals for this year:

Goals for 2009

I haven’t done great on the goals I posted late last year, but I did make some progress.  I did publish 4 pieces of Tiny Fiction, which is better than none. I also spend some time working on WGTA, but decided to just start over because I wanted to change a lot of stuff under the hood.  I also started yet another game, SYWTBK. Sometimes, my ADD can be really annoying.

Ah well, I’ll do better in 2009!

This is more of a note to myself, on what I’m trying to accomplish with my experiments with Tiny Fiction, and may likely be very disjointed.  The creative process for these things often starts with the first line of the story, and proceeds from there.  Often, I’ll have no idea where the story is going to end up.  Sometimes, I’ll have an idea of the tone I want to set (in Spies Like Us, for example, I wanted the tone to be bleak, and show how tired and worn Dmitri was by the process of being a spy).  Also, in each of these little nuggets, I want the reader to hunger for more.  I try to do this by including little interesting bits of detail, things I might reference in passing and never explore.  I’m sure I’m breaking all kinds of rules, and if I had bothered to take any writing classes in college, I might learn the “right” way to do this stuff, but I’ve read a lot of books and short stories, and I know what I like and don’t like.

I also want to use these small pieces of fiction to explore character development, and dialog.  I haven’t really had much dialog in either of them, but I’m going to work on that. Dialog is hard to do in only 500 words or so (my self-imposed limit to these stories), but I think that makes it more challenging — each word has to mean *just* the right thing.

This whole process has been interesting so far — now, all the time, I’m thinking up new ideas for Tiny Fiction. As I type this, I’m looking at 6 drafts that I’ve started, all in various states of completion.  One of them only has a title “The Short and Tragic Life of Archibald Turner”.  I have no idea what that story is going to be about, I just liked the title so I started a draft to capture the idea.  I guess that’s one of the exciting parts for me, having a place to capture all of these ideas, and actually bring some of them to fruition.

I’m not doing so great on my goal of writing a “short story” once a month (i.e., something more substantial than Tiny Fiction).  I have two ideas that I’m toying with for my first short story, and maybe I’ll just start throwing stuff out there for both and see what sticks.  Both are perfect for serial fiction — they’re ripe with ideas and characters begging to get into a series of adventures and mishaps. Hopefully after next week things for me in my personal life will begin to “settle down” (ha!) a bit more into a pattern and I can figure out how to fit these activities into my life.

Ah well, enough blathering on. I’ll maybe work on a story now.

Also, to add to goals, I want to start writing “Tiny Fiction”. I got the idea from the “New Times”, a weekly free news magazine I used to read in in Phoenix.  Every week, they had this tiny little one paragraph piece of fiction. It was fun, and it seems like a way to really stretch the imagination.  I like the idea so much, about two years ago I registered the domain name tinyfiction.com with the idea of setting up this place where people could submit these little micro-stories.  But, like many of my ideas, I never did anything with it, and didn’t bother to renew that domain, so I don’t own it any more.  Ah well.  Anyway, on to the goal:

• Once a week, I will write a piece of “Tiny Fiction” and post it to my blog.  I will do this as long as it’s sustainable.

It’s a little early to start making New Years Resolutions, but I’m going to start setting some goals for myself.  Here are some of them, in no particular order:

• Write short fiction, one story per month, for the next 6 months, starting in December. That means by December 31, I’ll have my first story done. Of course, I’ll post it here.  I’m going to focus on short fiction for a while as practice for finally working on a novel, which I’m planning to start on next summer.
• Finish at least a preliminary, multi-player version of WGTA (a video game).  Nik and I have been kicking the idea around forever, and I have a good, working base, I just need to finish it.
• Focus on getting myself out of debt.  I just paid off one of my smaller bills (yay!) and I need to make sure every available dime goes to my debt.  Which mean (really!!!) cutting out on non-essentials.
• Paint more of my Battlelore minis.  I really enjoyed painting them, and I’d like to get back to it.  I’ll make this goal more specific when I look at my minis and see how many are left to be painted.

That’s all for now, and I think it’s enough — these are reasonable things to accomplish, and I need to just set my mind to it.