In 2012, I’m taking on a challenge that I’m calling my Year of Stories. I’ll be releasing a new short story every Monday for the entire year, right here on my blog.

If the writing I’ve done so far is any indication, most of the stories will be soft sci-fi or slipstream (alternate versions of present day), but there will definitely be other genres mixed in, including fantasy, humour, and even a bit of drama.

You’ll be able to read each story for free as it’s released, or, if you’d like, stories will be available to download a week in advance for $1 each. I’ll also be making monthly digital anthologies available for $2.99 on both my blog and the Kindle Store. Depending on how things go, I’ll consider print anthologies down the road.

It takes me between 8 and 12 hours to conceive of, write, and edit a 3,000- to 5,000-word short story. A few stories will be shorter than that, of course, and a few will be longer, but either way, releasing a short story every week is going to be like taking on a part-time job, so I hope you’ll appreciate that this is pretty srs bsns for me. I have high expectations and higher hopes!

The inspiration for putting out a weekly short story came from a few different places. An obvious parallel is Jonathan Coulton’s Thing a Week, during which he put out a new song every week for a year. Another similar undertaking is the Write 1 Sub 1 writing group, created by Milo James Fowler, which encourages its members to write and submit a short story every week for a year. Year of Stories is a kind of self-publishing mash-up of those two things.

As I write and edit furiously for the next several weeks, trying to establish an early backlog, and as I get my new Store and the necessary blog infrastructure set up, I’ll be using your comments here, on Twitter, and on Facebook as fuel. I’m counting on all of you to help make Year of Stories a big success!