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.