Embracing Challenge: Reflections on A Story Every Day 2024

Unless you are very new here, or have been living under a particularly secluded rock, you'll already know this: I set myself a challenge to post a story every day last year.

And I did it!

Cue pom poms, fireworks, a small dog skateboarding past waving a flag, etc. Wooo hoooo! and so on.

I did it.

I kept going well into February, which meant I completed four hundred and ninety bloody days.

There were times it was hard. Times I felt like I had nothing in the tank. Others when I loved it. When the only downside was mourning the ideas that got away because I couldn't pin them down quick enough.

Honest? Some days I thought, why the bloody hell did I start this stupid thing. And writing is fucking stupid anyway. Times when I felt jaded. Exhausted.

But I did it.

Sort of.

Towards the end of the year, I was pulled in so many different directions that I missed some of my own criteria. I didn't manage to do a reflective piece in November or December. I didn't manage to keep up with reciprocating reads. My word count was over what it should be several times. I failed to keep up with doing recipes, reviews, and challenges.

But sod it all.

I did it.

I wrote a story every danged day.

The Nuts & Bolts

Word count

I'm not going back through November and December to figure out my word count. As a wise woman once said, ain't nobody got time fer that!

BUT.

I can do a quick calculation and see a rough estimate of how many words I wrote for this self-set challenge.

366 days. 366 words.

133,956

That's a lot of words. That's a bloody scifi novel.

It doesn't take into account that some of the stories were over the word count. It also doesn't factor in reflective pieces, longer fiction, or poems.

The actual count is probably closer to 200k.

Reads

Vocal doesn't let you look at your last year, but most of the time I was close-ish to 1,000 reads in a month. THANK YOU, most especially to the people who showed up with consistent support. It meant way more to me than the ~half-penny I got paid for your read.

What tickled you, my readers?

Get this: My most read story last year was this one:

I did not see that coming! That was a light-hearted, throw-away piece. It's not my best work. It's now my most read story ever! The Worst Heist sat stubbornly at the top spot for a LONG time, but this one has a lot more reads than that.

Achievements

• Top Stories: 23 of my story-a-day stories in 2025 were given "Top Story". You can see all my top stories here.
• I got Runner Up in 5 Vocal challenges.
• But mostly, I did it.

Reflection

Even when I loathed it, I felt the value of daily practise and (this is important) accountability.

The only reason I stopped in February was due to illness. (I was really ill for two weeks.) Starting again was hard.

My favourite story last year was probably... It's hard to pick a favourite, given that there's 366 of the buggers. Here are a few of the ones I was most pleased with in no particular order:

This one is so-so, but I'm including it for the author's note. I still chuckle about it sometimes:

What I Learned

It is absolutely amazing what can come out of you if you just keep going. Especially if you keep going beyond the point where you think you have nothing left.

Goals for 2025

• Maintain a daily writing (and reading) practise (before 11pm)
• Post dollar challenges approx monthly
• Reciprocate where I can and give back to this wonderful community
• Enter challenges, both on and off vocal

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Thank you for reading! KEEP WRITING!