It’s September and that means it is time for StoryADay, a twice-yearly (May and September) challenge to write a story (however you define that for yourself) every day. There are daily prompts on the website and you can sign up to get them by email, too. (A prompt from me will be up on September 13th!)

I’ve been doing StoryADay since 2011 and it has been so important in my development as a writer.

Obviously, I get lots of first drafts out of it (some more usable than others!). But it isn’t only that, by far. Every story written is more practice and nothing can substitute for that. Focused time, a couple of months a year, developing a new crop of fledgling stories is so helpful. When I look at calls for submission, I can go back to those stories and see what I have that suits.

But StoryADay is also community. It is community that posts in the comments on each day’s prompt. And community within Superstars, a private year-long space. (All thanks to Julie, who has built all of this!)

Oh, and there’s also a podcast! (Almost five years ago I was on it, talking with Julie about accountability.)

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So! Onto my plans for this September!

I’m going to write a story each day. Not necessarily stories from the prompts exactly, although certainly inspired by them. They will be short (750 words or so) and I don’t plan on doing much editing of them this month.

There are a few calls for submission coming up that I am interested in writing to, so I want to write a few story-possibilities on each of those (books and bikes, food, death — all in a science fiction framework).

Otherwise, I want to further explore the world of the novella I’m writing, so I will also write some stories that develop the events that happened before the beginning of my novella. This isn’t material that will find it’s way into the novella (not necessarily, anyway, there may be specific details that do get in, but not the full stories). This is more prequel fodder.

I am also planning on 10 blog posts (I guess, that’s 9 more now!). I have been very negligent of this blog, so I want to remedy that. The following posts will address a range of topics, but several of them will be about the stories I am currently writing for StoryADay.

Also, I have a bunch of stickers to mark my progress in my notebook. Thanks to the Superstars who have encouraged that habit!