I’m not a man that shies away from a challenge. I’m an Ironman finisher. I wrote a 300-page Kindle e-book titled How to Build a Wood-Fired Pizza Oven: Using Dry-Stack Masonry Methods ASIN: B0BXFQYVCD. I’m married with children.

I have some stories to tell. Lots of them, actually. Maybe too many but once you get to be a man of a certain age the stories accumulate. To tell these stories, they must be written sooner or later but I do not yet consider myself an excellent writer. To get to that level of writing I’ll need to apply the 10,000-hour rule as articulated by Malcolm Gladwell in his bestselling book Outliers: The Story of Success.

I just recently re-read Fahrenheit 451 (60th anniversary edition), by Ray Bradbury and thoroughly enjoyed it – many passages are still chillingly relevant. Ray Bradbury was a fellow Angelino and reading about him renting the typewriters in the UCLA library for 10-cents for 30-minutes at-a-time to write the novel was inspiring in his resolve plus I’ve been at that very library! Digging deeper into Bradbury’s life, I visited his website at https://raybradbury.com and discovered his thoughts on writing here, and this struck me:

Start short. Don’t start out writing novels—they take too long—“write a hell of a lot of short stories,” he said. Give yourself time to improve; with each week and month, you’ll see your stories improve. He claims that it simply isn’t possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

From this comes the self-imposed 52 Stories in 52 Weeks challenge.

I will try my best.

If you like, you can also follow me on my writing journey on Instagram @m.snarky.