Shakedown and Update

In January, as noted below, I took a lovely phone interview with Khrista Rypl of Studio 360. The idea was that as I wrote my 52 short stories this year I might share my progress with a national radio audience in a five-minute chat every six weeks or so.

Radio, of course, is a narrative medium, and as I talked to Khrista I could sense her trying to find a narrative frame for my Bradbury Project. What made you want to do this? What are you hoping to get out of it?

Now, I’ve written at some length in this space about my goals and motivations for this folly, and they’re admittedly a little… abstract. My main aim is to shake up my process, to jump-start my ideation; to work in different modes; to use deadlines to inspire velocity; to do the thing for its own sake. My goal, when deciding to write 52 short stories, was mostly just to write 52 short stories. Nothing more, nothing less. My end product would be 52 stories in my trunk and some incremental improvement in my writing. 

Explaining all this to Khrista, I began to realize how unsuited for radio this project really was. As I described it, it all seemed so nonlinear, so entirely process-oriented. There was no arc, no milestones along the way. It didn’t build to anything. It was just ticking off weeks on the calendar and piling up stories, one after another. 

When Studio 360 ultimately declined to include me in their ongoing coverage, I was disappointed but ultimately unsurprised. There was no proper language, no frame that could make the Bradbury Project compelling for radio, and that’s Khrista’s job: to make compelling radio. No harm, no foul.

I kept writing stories anyway. Not one a week, by any means — I should have 30+ in the can by now, and I’ve got nowhere near that — but stories. And any stories I wrote would be more than I wrote last year, so I was satisfied with my numbers. I just kept my head down and worked on thinking up ideas; I focused on the process and had not a worry in the world.

Then a funny thing happened; some of the stories, I thought, turned out pretty good.

This surprised me. When I decided on this exercise, quality never even entered into the equation. If I wrote anything good, it would be strictly by accident.

But I made my way through a batch of stories, and I caught myself thinking, I should pitch this somewhere.

And I’ve been doing just that. Over the last few months, I’ve pitched a number of new stories. They’ve all been dinged, so far. So barring a couple that are still outstanding, I’ve decided to retire this batch — most of which have been rejected by multiple markets — and present them here over the next few weeks, so that at least somebody gets a kick out of them.

First one runs tomorrow. See you then.