Story-A-Day Retrospective: Final Thoughts

My last thoughts on the Story-A-Day challenge are mostly about how I accomplished it, and what helped me do so.  In particular, I gave myself more accountability than I often do, and I think that helped force my way through it.  Without the built-in support and accountability of NaNoWriMo, I felt I had to do something to help myself out.

The main outlet for this was posting my goal and occasional progress on the goal to G+, to the survivors (at the time) of Mary Robinette Kowal's online writing class.  In particular, I think staking the goal out early and publicly helped, and I've continued the tradition for July.

The other tool for online accountability was using the Magic Spreadsheet, which a local writing friend introduced me to.  The idea there is to build up the chain of writing (at least a small amount) every day, and it gives you points -- more based on the chain you develop than on the amount of words that you write.  Since I had already decided I wanted to end up with 30 stories in 30 days, and mostly write them one a day, it was a natural fit.  So I started at the beginning of June, and was encouraged to see my words and points pile up through the month.

I've continued the habit as well, allowing my points to pile higher in the spreadsheet.

In conclusion, it was a great exercise, and I'll probably do it or something like it again -- but not too soon.  I've much enjoyed not having as much pressure when I've been writing for these past few days.