Not another post about blogging daily for 30 days
Yep, you’re welcome…
Well, I did it. I posted daily for 30 days straight. Ok, I technically missed one day but I had a pretty good reason. I published a 2000-word short story instead! More about that later.
I set myself a couple of other goals in this period:
- To setup a mailing list and start building a list of subscribers interested in my work
- To write two short stories over 1000 words in length each.
Starting a mailing list
In line with the first goal, I now have a mailing list with around 20 subscribers. Humble beginnings and all that. A couple of them were people I already knew. But most of them are not. They genuinely want to keep up to date with what I’m doing and for this I am extremely humbled.
Now the pressure is on to nurture that list and not let down those who have entrusted me with their consent to email them.
I sent out a couple of emails in the last month. The second one had a much better open rate and more clicks so I think I’m heading in the right direction.
I’m currently operating the list completely free of charge by using the free version of Upscribe for the embedded signup forms on my Medium posts and the free version of MailChimp to send out campaigns.
I have to manually export the Upscribe list and import into MailChimp before each mail out but I don’t mind doing this for now.
Writing two short stories of over 1000 words each
I ended up changing this goal slightly. Instead of writing two stories, I only wrote one but it reached 2000 words so I feel I achieved what I set out to accomplish.
The point of this goal was to push me to write stories that were longer than my typical 400–600 words. I definitely achieved that! Here’s what I created:
I wrote this from start to finish in about 3–4 days. It was exhausting but exhilarating! I even got a friend to create some illustrations for the story and I love them. Really proud of it all.
There was a key piece of writing theory that helped me construct this story. I came across the “five key plot points” concept and this gave me a great framework upon which to hang a story.
Without this, I would probably have started writing a little story and run out of steam well before 1000 words. By properly thinking about a structure beforehand and creating a story that hung off these five key plot points, I found it easy to build a world and piece together a narrative that filled 2000 words.
Arguably, any story that hangs off the five key plot points is suitable for a novel or a screenplay. Good to know!
What next?
Conquering the world, I guess.
On a more practical note, I’m going to try to keep some momentum by posting several times a week. I think I’m also going to switch back to making my blog posts member-only so I can hopefully make a few short-term dollars from my efforts.
Longer-term, I need to finish my novel. Bet you haven’t heard that one before.
Enjoyed the read? Subscribe to my prose and poetry updates. I send oh-so-literary goodies to your inbox…
