Spring is in the air, and after more than 2 years of working on said novel and writing only a handful of short stories in that time, I’ve been itching lately for a new project. Or at least a reason to move on to something else.
So now I’m issuing a kick-in-the-pants challenge to myself: to write a story a day for the entire month of April.
This is perhaps the worst month I could have chosen for such an endeavor, I’ve got a bachelor party to attend, a half marathon, the 3 day Coachella music festival in the desert, not to mention finishing up on various free-lance jobs, including the author’s series I’m directing, and also trying to find a full time job. But if it were easy it wouldn’t be any fun.
And in keeping with my “going back to the roots” kick, I’ve realized recently that I’ve read very few of the “classic” works of literature out there. Don Quixote? No. Grapes of Wrath? Nope. Lord of the Flies? I have it but I’ve never read it. To write well one must read a lot, and be well-read. So I’ve put myself on a diet of choice works in the Western canon, starting with the Iliad, then on to the Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, The Arabian Nights, et cetera, all the way to modern must-reads like Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. So what I’m hoping is that by reading a ton of classic stuff and writing a lot every day, I might generate some workable material.
I could do this on my own, without posting it on this blog, but I think there’s a certain accountability I’ll feel by blogging this challenge. I also like the idea of writing for a specific audience, namely the handful of people who even know that I have a blog. Knowing my audience, somehow, helps me to make better narrative choices, I think.
More than anything, my goal is to rocket launch my raw productivity. I’m concerned purely with vomiting out the pages, not polishing diamonds.
All the stories I will submit are very rough first drafts, and therefore aren’t exactly finished, even if they do have endings. Having said that, I welcome any criticism (or further ideas for development) you’d like to submit about the stories.
So without further diversion, click here to read today’s story. Sorry, it doesn’t have a title.
(Preface: in looking for ideas for a story this morning, I went to Wikipedia and found this article on Wife Selling which seemed to me so archaic and absurd that it couldn’t not be an interesting concept…at least for a very short story. The article mentions occasional Husband Selling, which spawned the idea for the story. Ultimately, I was less interested in exposing the obvious human rights atrocities associated with human-selling, and more interested in exercising my chops in absurdism by sketching out a slice of life in a loveless marriage.)
