Starting on My Bradbury Year

A 52-week challenge for everyone.

It all started when I discovered

Layne Mercer

back when we was working on his Bradbury year last year. I was intrigued. Mostly because it was not the first time I had heard that phrase, “Bradbury Year,” mentioned and so seeing it again piqued my interest. When I first heard about it, the task was daunting to me: Read one poem, read one short story and write one short story every week.

And when I saw what Layne was doing I had to find out more. So, I did what anyone with a question these days would do, I slipped into his DMs and asked him if he wouldn’t mind answering some of my questions pertaining to his Bradbury Year. I was delighted when he agreed and it worked out perfectly to align with the end of his year! You can watch our discussion here.

Layne managed to make me feel that maybe I could have my own year and not make it such a daunting task on myself. I could mold it into whatever works for me because at the end of the day, the point of having a Bradbury Year is to come out the other end with maybe some good material.

The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week—it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful.

-from “Telling the Truth,” the keynote address of The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea, sponsored by Point Loma Nazarene University, 2001

Before I get into how I’m going to structure my own Bradbury Year I want to say that everything I outline below will be behind a paywall. That means only Paid Subscribers will be able to read what I write for this. Why am I putting it all behind a paywall? The simple answer is because the end result of this experiment, I hope, will result in short stories I intend on putting into a collection and my usual process for work I intend to self-publish later is to put it behind a paywall. Also, this entire thing will likely be messy and not everyone will want or care to see it until the finished product is ready for public consumption. I also feel like it will all be quite freeing for me if I put it someplace where only a handful of people will actually see it and judge my work. However, if you are able, you can subscribe. I currently have TWO price tiers to choose from:

$5/m or $10/m

The Set-Up

• Read one short story. Preferably a classic that can be found in the public domain so that others might join me in reading it as well.

• Write one short story. The word count will be between 500 - 7,500.

• Share my behind-the-story analysis of the short story I wrote.

Each of these will be done every week and shared via email as follows:

• Fridays - Select and read a short story over the weekend.

• Mondays - Share my short story that I should’ve started writing the week before. [Email]

• Wednesdays - Behind-the-story analysis. [Email]