In spite of all the careful planning to make it the easiest term of my undergraduate degree, life found ways of making Winter term of fourth year far tougher than I wanted. But I’m a grad student now—well, technically on May 1st—and supposed to have a tiny bit of free time. For as long as that holds, there will be more writing!
Unlike the calendar year to date. Because of the way things worked out from mid-January to early April, I pretty much abandoned my hopes of exploring different kinds of writing by picking a theme for each month of the year. Since it’s only the tenth and I have already had a handful of more mentally relaxing days (wherein much housework was done), I could theoretically still pick up April’s theme, but since that’s supposed to be a movie-length screen play and I don’t want to start so far behind, I’ll save that for later, and I’m going to spend the rest of the month catching up a bit on background goals.
But starting in May, I’d like to try picking the themes up again and carry through the rest of the year, my studies allowing. Keep in mind that very key clause.
To recap, and I’ll make it short versions (the original post is here) the rest of the year is supposed to look like this:
May – May Micro
A daily piece of micro-fiction. I’m defining micro as a maximum of 250 words down to six-word stories. I’ll mostly be trying for Drabble length and shorter.
June – Will You Survive?
My own contribution to the Choose Your Own Adventure genre. I think I have the basic structure worked out and it’s unsurprisingly going to be SF with a bit of Fantasy mixed in.
July – Songs of Summer
Two songs per week, leaving a little wiggle room in a 31-day month. Not the music, just lyrics. I would love to be able to write music, but it’s not in my wheelhouse.
August – Memories
Pushing as far as I can towards the completion of a volume of the Memory Project. This will probably still be Volume 3, covering my time as a young university student (the first time), but who knows?
September – All the World’s a Stage
Four one-act plays, one a week. I’m looking at a standard-ish definition of a 15-minute (or less) play which apparently translates into 9-12 pages.
October – There’s Stories In Them Thar Hills
Four short stories outside my normal genres. My plan is Historical, Mystery/Noir, Spy Thriller, and Western. October is still far away, though, so no promises are made.
November – NaNoWriMo
National Novel Writing Month is every November, and the objective is to draft a 50k-word novel in 30 days, although putting 50,000 words into a novel that you start on November 1st is generally considered acceptable as long as you do ultimately finish it.
December – Blog a Day
Just as self-explanatory as it sounds: a blog post every day for the last month of the year.
That’s the basic plan, with other, more standard goals progressing in the background. I kind of like this idea. If it goes well, we might try it again next year, picking up the themes I dropped from early this year to begin with, although 2026 will see a need to start getting ready for my thesis defense at some point, so there might be a fiction and regular writing drop off in favour of academics.
Be well, everyone.
Life, Writing, Weirdness 
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