What is 52 Short Stories?

Welcome to 52 Short Stories, a year-long experiment.

At its simplest, 52 Short Stories is the blog that will follow my successes, my failures, my random thoughts, my transcendent insights and my practical advice, while I attempt the seemingly impossible task of writing 52 short stories in a single year.

While the blogging aspect is fairly straightforward, I think the experiment itself needs a little bit more clarification.

The experiment is relatively unstructured. Logically, to write 52 short stories in a year, one would aim to write a story a week. While that is my target, I have no delusions of sticking to that schedule. Any writer - or anyone who has ever tried to put letters together to make words, and then put those words together to make sentences - knows that inspiration and productivity rarely flow in such a consistent manner. There will be weeks that not a single word is written, and there will be weeks, where - gods willing - there will be two or three short stories completed.

To further de-structurize this experiment, there are no rules surrounding what constitutes a short story. There is no upper or lower word limit. There is no common specified theme. There is no guidance. There may not even be a language requirement.

In order for me to count a story towards the total count of 52, the only criterion it must fulfill, is that I deem it to be done. However, even the definition of done, is a loose one. The stories that will be completed will likely not be publication-ready stories. They might not even be the kind of thing I'd be willing to submit to an editor. Had I wanted to be more precise, I could have called this experiment 52 First Drafts.

Now that you know what 52 Short Stories is, the question you should be asking yourself is why?  Why would anyone undertake such a seemingly pointless endeavour? Why would that person then want to blog about it? And possibly the most important question for you, the reader, is why would anyone want to read this blog?

Those answers are coming.