It’s March 15th, 2015. I am ten weeks into this writing every day thing, which puts me nearly 20% of the way done with the year. It’s time for the Week Ten update on my 1K a Day Challenge!

Days 67 through 73 have been successes, with a minimum of 1,000 words per day written. 

Stats for Days 67 to 73:

Day 67 – 1134 words
Day 68 – 1127 words
Day 69 – 1200 words
Day 70 – 1011 words
Day 71 – 1302 words
Day 72 – 1237 words
Day 73 – 1129 words

Total count for the year thus far is 99,998 words (so close to 100K!). Average daily word count is 1,369 words. Gridfall is at 95,091 words. Based on my projections for the story, it is 47% finished.

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So instead of talking about the world of Gridfall as I’ve been doing, I thought I’d take a little break and talk about the round robin writing game instead. I’ll link to a place where they can be read once they’re completed, but until then I’ll spend the next five weeks talking about each story in turn and what about them has me excited.

So for starters, the game works like this:

Each week, the participants write 400-600 words for whatever story they’ve been assigned that week. There are five participants in this game, whom I will refer to by the story they started rather than their names. This is the third week, and so each participant is writing the third part to the story they’ve been assigned this week. By the end each story will have 11 parts, roughly 5,500 words total, a respectable short story written by five different people.

I have done collaborative writing before, both successful ventures (Creative Writing Story 3) and unsuccessful ones (the story seed that became Gridfall), and there’s a lot of excitement and nervousness that goes along with sharing a story. You have to be willing to loosen the reins and just sorta go with the flow of how other people see the story and characters and not get upset when something happens you didn’t like or you wouldn’t have done. The point is not to write a story you would have written, but to write a story you never could have written, going in directions you didn’t expect. It’s meant to be an exercise in teamwork, in creative writing, and in the logistics of storytelling when you aren’t in control of every last aspect.

And most importantly, it’s not to be taken seriously. It’s for fun. None of us are getting paid for this and even if we write serious stories there’s no reason to take it all so serious (obligatory why so serious).

So! The story I started is called “The Bones of the Universe” and is about a meteorite crashing to Earth and the subsequent happenings resulting. A story perhaps told time and again, but there’s always fun to be had in the “it came from outer space” realm of science fiction storytelling.

Meteor chasers Silas and Marie are on the hunt for a rock from space – they make their living off the precious materials contained within. Silas is in the field while Marie is playing support from afar, and they’ve lain claim to the newest rock, but they get more than bargained for when Silas reaches the impact zone…

I didn’t write for this story this week, but it’s been a lot of fun to read so far. There are elements derived from real-life storm chasers, the sci-fi comedy Evolution, the space western Cowboy Bebop, and it’s been a blast to see what other people have done with it thus far.

Next week I’ll talk about the dystopian tale “The Reapers”!

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You can follow me on Facebook or Twitter to see my progress and little daily anecdotes, and join in if you like!

And remember, writing is a skill. So write the hell on, writers.