As I said in my first post of the year, my goal is to write one short story a month. For the sake of a guideline, I am going to use the following reason to set a length for my short stories.
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America specifies word lengths for each category of its categories:
| Classification | Word count |
| Novel | over 40,000 words |
| Novella | 17,500 to 40,000 words |
| Novelette | 7,500 to 17,500 words |
| Short story | under 7,500 words |
So, my goal is a story that is somewhere between 1,000 and 7,500 words every month.
As to what I’m going to write about, my plan is to sit down at the beginning of each month and chose a prompt and see what happens from there. For January’s story, I am going to use The Amazing Story Generator to create a prompt. Someone bought it for me, and I’ve never used it to write a story.
For January, the prompt is….
“While dog-sitting, a mustachioed private detective uncovers a hidden family secret.”
Story to be posted…Jan. 31, 2015!
(I let my husband use the story generator. Sigh. Oh well, let’s see what I come up with.)
Happy writing!
Still Working on My Novel 