Year of Drayton 2023-2024
A 100 Word Story Journey (and more...)
Is it too late to play catch-up on the fame that is Brandon Sanderson? Maybe yes. And maybe no. Either way, I watched his Year of Sanderson 2023 YT video and was blown away by the scope of his dedication to not only his craft but his fans and giving them “all the cosmere things.”
It made me want to look back on my year but specifically on my first completed year of writing 100 word stories every single day. As you are reading this I will have written 366 stories and delivered them to you, my most loyal subscribers! Doing the math, that’s 36,600 words. Not much by novel standards but a whole hell of a lot when you stand back and take stock! And taking stock is what I intend to do right here.
So, if you’ll indulge me, let’s take a walk through my 100 word story garden…
I think the best place to start would be where my head was at before I even made this crazy decision.
Looking back on the posts just before May 1, 2023 I could see I was a mess. Well, maybe “a mess” is too harsh a label to put on myself. But I was all over the place. Just look at my May 1st Update email:
It seems I was writing “editorials” every two days and hardly any fiction content. I was burning myself out with creating content that may have been helpful to a select few in the writing community but wasn’t really what I wanted to be spending my time writing.
Then I started writing 100 word stories as a community effort. A way to get everyone writing them with me as opposed to me going off and doing it on my own. I suppose something changed within me (…something is not the same… don’t start singing this song!) and I needed to get back to the fiction.
I'm through with playing by the rules
Of someone else's game
Too late for second-guessing
Too late to go back to sleep
It's time to trust my instincts
Close my eyes and leap
It's time to try defying gravity
I think I'll try defying gravity
So, on May 1st I wrote this…
…and every single day since then I managed to continue writing 100 word stories. In the early days it wasn’t easy. Actually, those 31 days of May were tough. But luckily, I knew the problem right away. I needed a way to have ideas regularly so I wasn’t “writing blind” as I like to think of it. The solution was to give myself little themes to carry me along the way and the themes I’ve given myself have literally carried me all this way. I honestly do not believe for one moment that I would have made it one full year without them. So, here is a look back at all of the themes that amounted to 366 days worth of stories:
Literary Tarot | A Kickstarter campaign that I had backed the year before and I had been waiting for a really long time for it to arrive because I initially backed it for the sole purpose of using each card as inspiration for my storytelling. At the time I was intending on using them to write a much longer story but as it happened it arrived just in time for me to use for my 100 word stories and it contributed to a full 78 days!
Song Lyrics | It’s not easy to just come up with themes on the fly but I love music and at the time I was listening to a lot of my old favorites like The Beatles, Elvis, and artists like that. It didn’t take me long to realize I could easily take certain verses from songs and use them to not only tell a story each day but have a running narrative to string them together as well.
Classic Songs from Musicals | Easily my favorite genre of movies. If I could only pick one genre to watch for the rest of my life, while I do love a great noir or Hitchcock-style film, I would choose musicals. And this was my opportunity to pay homage to some of my favorite musicals as well as musical numbers from movies that I love.
Newsletter Publication Names | A moment of desperation or genius? However you want to look at it, I took the clever names of fellow fiction writers with newsletters and created a story with each. I enjoyed this theme because it also gave me a unique opportunity to highlight some of my favorite newsletters.
Pentober 2023 Edition | Takes place for 31 days in October, an idea born from Inktober, when illustrators use a pre-assigned word as inspiration for a drawing. I wanted to do something similar but writing a story instead. And to make it more interesting the story is written using pen and paper, NO technology! I hope this is something that will outlast me and more people will participate this October.
Twelve Days of Christmas | I had this grand idea in my head that I would take each day of the poem and create some sort of slasher storyline. I’m not quite sure I hit it off the way I had hoped but it was fun to do.
Original Twilight Zone | This was around the new year, a time when I think about two shows the most: The Honeymooners and The Twilight Zone. Now that I think about it, in hindsight, maybe taking the titles of The Honeymooners to use as inspiration for some storytelling would’ve been a cool idea. But instead I went through all 150+ episodes of the original series and tried to pick out some that may not be as popular or well known as others to use as inspiration for my stories.
Creatures of the Night | An oracle deck I chose to use at the last minute. Another scramble for a theme you could say but it served its purpose in that I was able to keep momentum going for another month. This deck features creatures of the night but left enough ambiguity that I had plenty of room to take the story wherever I wanted.
Community Sentences | This is where the fiction community, specifically on Substack Notes, really came through for me. I sent the call out for first sentences of 10 words or less that I could use to start me off on my 100 word journey. I really enjoyed this exercise and hope to get even more contributors should I put the call out again.
Mystic Madness Tarot | This tarot deck had me as excited to work with and use as the Literary Tarot because it pairs The Wizard of Oz and Wonderland together with some really uniquely designed cards. With both in the public domain it leaves room to basically play however I want.
National Poetry Month | Probably the toughest challenge and theme I’ve given myself thus far. As most themes I went into it unplanned and unprepared. I just knew I needed to write a 100 word poem every single day for 30 days and while some of them may not be the best thing ever written I can say I did it and who knows, I might do it again next year.
What does the next year of 100 word stories look like? I don’t know, really. I try not to plan too far ahead the themes I’m going to use just in case something falls in my lap that’s better. But, I do want to highlight one thing that has come of my first year of writing these stories and that’s (so far) three paperback books! They are available on Amazon and just about anywhere you can purchase books online. If you had told me my massively ambitious, unplanned, idea would lead to not only 366 stories written but three self-published books as well, I would’ve thought you were mad. But here we are.
If you want my storytelling journey on your shelf, I would be hugely grateful and honored.
The Second 100 is available for pre-order. Release date of Tuesday, June 25th.
Purchasing the first or both of these books would really be so amazing but there are other ways you can show your support:
Sharing my newsletter with your friends and family is really easy. You can also become a paid subscriber. This will get you access not only to my archived 100 word stories but plenty of other short fiction and my serial as well!
Congratulations on a year of consistency, community and shared inspiration. Love the ways you kept the ideas flowing. I was just musing that this writing malarkey is 80% ideas (and 80% words … you can see why I write, maths is NOT my thing!). Happy writing, Erica.