2025 Vocal Goal Achieved

In January 2025, inspired by Rachel Deeming, I set out to write at least one story for each of the 48 Vocal communities throughout the year. Today, I have written the last one for the Interview. So, that particular goal has been achieved and all the stories are here:

I'm very pleased with myself as I had not written anything for many of those communities before because I didn't feel I was an expert or had anything worthy to say. The particular challenge were Blush, Cleats, Filthy, Gamers, Horror, Interview, Marriage, Chain, Trader, Unbalanced, Viva, and Wheel. I had to be particularly creative and find an interesting angle, personal connection, or event I could use as a peg so that I didn't feel like an imposter. In most of those stories, I would make a full disclosure about why I wrote the story.

So, every Vocal community served with at least one story this year. Would I do this again? - Probably, especially now that I know it's possible. I would probably start with the most difficult communities first this time rather than delaying them to the last possible moment.

I would also try to spread them throughout the year more evenly. In the month of December only, I wrote nine stories after I realized that I was still left with 10 communities when I published my 500th story in late November. And that's in addition to my regular stories in Fiction, Poets, and The Swamp communities.

When I started in January, I thought I'd write about one story for a different community each week. It was a sound plan (52 weeks for 48 stories would give me some flexibility), and if I stuck to it I wouldn't have the stress of writing four last stories in one week. But I kept delaying the most difficult ones or the ones I had a lot of material for, eg. the story I published about Putin's crimes in Criminal took almost two years to collect all the facts. So, my advice to myself would be to do better planning and scheduling of stories, to spread them out more evenly during the year.

And I still believe some of the communities are redundant and should be merged, especially where no stories have been published for months or years. But this is beyond this little "achievement report."

I have also achieved an accidental goal that I didn't set for myself as it would have seemed impossible at the beginning of the year: 15,000 reads. In January, after 3.5 years on Vocal, I had a little under 9,000 reads, and 15K was crazy to think about. But when I noticed that I was at 14,880 a week ago, I thought, "Omg, there's a chance of hitting 15K before the year ends!" I am incredibly grateful to everyone who read my stories and helped me get to this significant mark. I wouldn't have been able to do it without you.

Here are some other interesting stats about my writing on Vocal in 2025:

1. I have written 148 stories. That's 28% of the total 522 stories I have published in my entire time on Vocal. I heavily favored the following communities: Fiction - 34 stories; The Swamp - 22; Poets (mostly haiku) - 14 stories; and 5-6 stories in each of Geeks, Writers, Journal, Wonder, and Critique. All other communities got one or two stories.

2. I have written 15 Drabbles - stories of exactly 100 words. I also wrote a pretty cool guide on how to write a Drabble, if I may so myself.

3. I have placed in three challenges, two runner-ups and one honorable mention. All my placements in Vocal challenges were this year, but I have yet to win an official challenge.

4. I have been rewarded, in one way or another, in three unofficial challenges by my fellow authors on Vocal. I consider these wins as valuable, if not more, as official challenges.

5. I've also served as a judge on a fellow writer's unofficial challenge. That was also a great experience, even though it was hard to judge excellent entries.

6. I have hosted two of my own unofficial challenges and had a ton of fun with them both. Musk as an alien was also received very well.

7. I have received a Top Story badge 18 times. Starting in June, I got TS two times a month for each month. One of the accidental discoveries I made during this year is that if you write a good story for a community that has not published anything in weeks, months or years, you have a much better chance for that story to get a TS badge.

8. One of my stories, Canadian Egg Saga, is inching to getting 1,000 reads. That was one of the most surreal experiences, when it got over 500 reads in one day and shot up my reading stats bar to the height that screwed up the chart for a month. It also gave me an idea for the story that placed in the Absurdist Awakening challenge.

Overall, I believe this was a good year for me on Vocal. Let's see what the next year brings.

Happy New Year, everyone!