notes on the process

365 days / 365 stories

"The final story" marks the finish line of Susan Gibb's year-long writing challenge. The task: to write 365 stories in 365 days. Below, some of her diary notes on the challenge of daily story writing.

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January 2nd
It won't be more than mere practice, no eloquence finely honed and polished to perfection, but a flash piece each day.

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May 30th
Today marks the one hundred fiftieth story I've written as part of my commitment to write daily since January 1st of this year. It also coincides with Day 10 of the 100 Day Project for this summer of 2011.
It's quite a learning process, to find a story to write every day, to change narrative voice and writing style, to investigate techniques and language and genres. Some of these pieces have already been picked up and published elsewhere; most will never move beyond the pages of my weblog. There are those I feel really good having written, and those that even with the famous editorial eye, just aren't pleasing even to their own “mother.”

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July 7th
I've really been writing a story a day since January 1st and have passed the halfway mark a few days ago.

Several changes have occurred in the process. Starting out, I wrote a story as influenced by Carianne Mack Garside's artwork. Her own commitment to produce a piece daily was affected by her baby's growth and curiosity and resulting need for extra attention so I continued on my own. Inspiration came out of thin air. When the 100 Days Project came up at the end of May, I decided to once more hook up with the group, and so it goes. Even with this project, we'll be hitting another halfway mark of 50 days of daily work this weekend.

It's amazing how many ideas and storylines a writer can find, either spurred by the creativity of others or just by life itself. Someone made a comment on one of my stories to the effect that he found it surprising that I could develop some many different characters, a new one each day. I laughed and responded that perhaps it is the writer's version of multiple personality disorder.

Meanwhile, because I have been reading the other participant's work, as well as those of fellow writers on Fictionaut and new literary publications as they come out, I haven't kept up on my novel reading, nor my hypertext and new media learnings (last posting at Hypercompendia was on the Morpheus software!) so these two weblogs have been sort of stagnant for a while except when something interesting (at least to me!) happens and I'll post to the Reality category.

Gardening, framing, reading, and writing; this will be my summer.

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August 29th

Well, another year down and another 100 stories written–though they're only a portion of the 365 I'm committed to write this year.

The summer 100 Days Projects started in 2008 with Carianne Mack painting daily and a poem inspired by it by Steve Ersinghaus. This collaboration resulted in a beautiful book of the complete works. I started the 100 Days Project in 2009, writing a hypertext story every day for 100 days in conjunction with about a dozen others who dedicated their days to art, poems, stories, films, audio, etc. In the summer of 2010, I participated with 100 flash fiction pieces and a matching image which served to practice my Photoshopping and Photography skills.

There were about sixty participants starting out this year, with a good forty-plus finishing. Some of the most fantastic artwork, poetry, photography was produced by some extremely talented artists and writers. What was neat for me this year was that a few of my friends from Fictionaut were coerced into joining up and so there was a better sense of camaraderie and support. While we can say we create for ourselves, we really do appreciate an audience for our efforts and there were a precious few folk (bless ‘em!) who read or viewed almost all the work of their fellow artists and were encouraging by their comments and retweets or Facebook notices. Believe me, that was most appreciated.

But I'm not nearly done; I've got an end date of December 31st, 2011. While I may have written 240 stories this year, I've still got 125 to go. Then editing, reworking, and sorting into some semblance of order for either individual or an anthology submission

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January 3rd

The Last Story
"The first word of the last story I write will have to fly like the non-random darting bows of a bat, sensitive as sonar to wring empathy quick and flowing with relative response from its readers..."

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January 26th
All the stories previously posted are currently under Password Protection while I edit, organize, and prepare for possible submission which requires that the work not be posted anywhere online.

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(all entries are from Susan Gibb's blog Spinning)
back to "The Last Story")