The goal
Publish a fiction story online.
No need for marketing, but it must be officially published somewhere online (at this stage, probably on Smashwords).
Why
I really enjoyed writing stories in primary school, but moved on to other interests and only wrote when required in high school.
I’ve known about Smashwords and other online publishing platforms for many years, and in the last couple of years have been following an excellent site for fiction writers that I discovered through my network.
A few months ago, I was inspired to start writing a story (more on that below) and I think I need the help of the bucket blog to finish it off and try publishing it.
I like the idea of writing a book, but that’s way too long for a bucket blog list item. Depending on how the current story goes, I might think bigger.
Progress so far
Very rarely, I’ll wake up in the morning and manage to go back to sleep. I’ll have very vivid dreams and usually be able to exert a little control. Sometimes it’s a flying dream, sometimes I’m in a beautiful impossible world, and sometimes there’s a lot of plot.
I had one of the latter type of dream a few months ago. It was the beginning few minutes of an interesting story, so I started writing it down as soon as I woke up.
It was fun to write, and the story flowed out of me fairly quickly and painlessly in a few multiple-hour writing sessions.
When I started writing, I had no idea how long the story would be. As the word count started climbing and I still had most of the story left to write, I looked into plot structure and got lost down the TV Tropes rabbit hole (but found useful pages).
The story was based on an old Dungeons & Dragons character of mine, so I knew a fair amount about how the character behaved. The name was from an existing book, so I used a name generator to come up with another name.
The word count is just under 7k words of text, and I have another 700-odd words of notes on the rest of the plot and things to remember.
I’ll check the current draft before sharing it in a separate post. That portion of the story will probably change, especially if I pay for professional editing, but putting something on the blog always helps me make further progress.
Before I wrap up this post: one option from CreativIndie that seems sensible is to publish the first part of a story for free and not write the rest (which won’t be free) until a certain number of readers indicate their interest for the rest. This is a way of checking for market demand and get feedback before spending lots of time and effort on a story that might not be a commercial success. I might try this idea with a future story, depending on how much I enjoy writing and how hard it is to finish the current story, but it’s not necessary to tick off this bucket list item.