Category: Information

I’ve never done much non-fiction writing outside of a school or office setting. I’ll be trying out some different styles over the next nine months (or so), and gathering them all in this post.

Rushmore Retrospective

The Earth Does Not Belong to Humans

The Rock Hand

In Defense of the Unquantifiable

The early 2020’s have already poked a new hole in Federalist No. 10.

The Alarm Bell is Blaring

Speculation of Bad Things to Come

The Strangest Music I’ve Ever Made – The Oiloid Syrup Double Gem Story

The Most Obvious, Most Troubling Story that No One Seems to Acknowledge

And that is that! It took longer than nine months to write these stories, and frankly, I ready for a new experiment. It was fun writing some non-fiction, but the theme of the year was a bit more of a constraint than I enjoyed. Along with everything happening in life (moving, getting a day job, continuing to build pedals, working on my second novel, and getting married), it was difficult to keep to the schedule.

Here’s to what comes next.

This year, I want to do something different.

I have a lot more going on now then when I started this. I started posting a bunch of poetry because it doesn’t take as long to write, but I’m not all that interested in continuing to write poetry. I mostly want to write fiction. Trying to write a decent story once a week just isn’t quite feasible anymore, so, for 2021, I’m going to be adding one story per month.

I’m leaving everything else about it rather open. I have some ideas for January, but I might not stick with them throughout the year. I want to come up with some new things to experiment with, after all.

To start with, I’ll be using some random word generators and writing prompts and go from there.

As usual, I’ll link to the stories below as they come out. I’ll also add a note about what technique I was experimenting with.

The Water Shine Persists – generated some random words and built a short scene around them.

ample acceptable amiability – randomly generated words as a foundation

a bothersome counterpoint derives eternity – I think this is called a pangram – first letter of each word cycles through the alphabet

the retreat ends – didn’t utilize any particular experiments with this, just tried to tie everything so far together into something more coherent

in the cave – this month was busy and dramatic, I ended up just connecting more dots from previous experiments

the land falls into the sea – this month was actually busier and more dramatic, so this was just stream-of-consciousness with very little editing

adequate fire in a cave or tunnel – this month, I hit the keyboard randomly, and then went back and looked for syllables/things that reminded me of words and shaped the writing around those found words

lily on the cliff – beginning with a title which was largely randomly generated, this month, I wanted to focus on a setting, but even that ends up taking on some narrative structure.

Cafe Ceiling – much like last month, I randomly generated a title, which gave me a vivid mental image, which I attempted to paint.

An Instant – bringing things together which were not originally intended to be connected

Collapsing – this began as a pangram poem, but using two words in a row with each letter instead of just one. It was then shaped into a more narrative structure, ending with a bit of stream-of-consciousness.

dreaming – a one sentence story to end with