Alright, a little 2017 retrospective with all the short stories I wrote for the year along with some musings. I wrote 55 short stories and I had a little thing where I put in all the little thing of abandoned snippets that didn't end up being stories. That said, still, a couple there that are abandoned, but not as many as I feared. Kind of impressed with my output this year!
My personal favorites for the year I'm going to push to try and get published in 2018 are
Pauli Meets a Suicidal Man (the plot is self-explanatory) and
What My Pa Left Me which won one of the CW challenges and had a pretty universally positive reception. Also my favorite ending that I've written this year (Pauli being second). I'm going to come back to
Duel with a Hedge Mage cause I recently described it to a friend and they said it sounded more interesting than I gave it credit for (along with some other random stories but none standing out atm). My favorite titles (cause I love my pretentious titles) are
The Exorcism of a Haunted House Beside a Seaside Cliff cause it captures the moody feel I wanted in the story even though it didn't come out very good and
They Found Nalbiet in the Ashen Forest cause its a nice and ominous title. I'm going to come back to the story labeled
I got published (title not final) cause I love the premise. It's about a student going to visit their old creative writing teacher and the visit ending in utter disappointment for a lot of reasons. I never finished it, but I still love the general theme.
I think my take away this year is I have really improved in quality and have kind of solidified a style for myself as opposed to a lot of my experimentations in 2016. Which may be good. May be bad. Who knows? I'll still try for some more oddball things in 2018 because I think those are always helpful to at least try. As Cyan said before he stopped the CW challenges, it's a good idea to get out of your comfort zone which I fear I may be falling a bit into.
