(370 + 500 words)
First of all, a Very Happy New Year to all my followers, and to those followers with blogs and/or books, I wish you every success with them in 2018!
I’m starting the year with 350 followers, which I can hardly believe, so thank you again for following To Cut a Short Story Short!
I’m very pleased to say that I managed to post a new story every five days throughout 2017, a goal I set for myself. I also self-published two books and had audiobooks made from them, something I never could have imagined one year ago!
https://tocutashortstoryshort.com/books-by-simon-j-wood/
I also entered two writing competitions a month throughout the year. No prizes yet, but fingers crossed for the coming year!
I’m intending to continue my WordPress publishing schedule throughout 2018, and I’ll be publishing a new book of stories about October time: To Cut a Short Story Short II: 89 Little Stories. Because the stories are longer now, that’ll be around 80,000 words, which should come out to around 400 pages, so quite a substantial volume. It should be available as an audiobook in time for Christmas 2018!
I’ve got a children’s picture book in the pipeline too, Promise Her the Moon, which has been submitted to a number of publishers and which I hope will be accepted and in print in the latter part of 2018. Then, who knows, there might even be a sequel!
https://tocutashortstoryshort.com/2017/07/18/promise-her-the-moon/
Finally, I’ve been running a fortnightly story group for the last two years (currently 400 words). A collection is sent out by e-mail every other Sunday. Right now there are a small number of dedicated contributors sending in one or two stories per fortnight (big thanks to those talented people!). New members are always welcome!
https://tocutashortstoryshort.com/contact/
So, without further ado, I’m republishing New Year’s Eve Ritual, my third most popular post (in terms of ‘likes’) ever. I have to copy the post, otherwise, a notification isn’t sent out, which means there are two copies of the same story on the blog, but I think it’s worth it. I don’t want to copy and paste the old comments, but if you’d like to read them (recommended) here’s the link.
https://tocutashortstoryshort.com/2017/01/19/new-years-eve-ritual/
Best wishes, Simon.
Featured in the book and audiobook, To Cut a Short Story Short: 111 Little Stories
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