Writer's Stop (Photo credit: Stephh922)

I just came across this writing challenge Write 1 Sub 1. Here is the description:

• Write and submit a short story or poem every week (or month), starting the first week of January and ending the last week of December.
• Goal: 52 new submissions in 52 weeks (or 12 in 12 months).
• You don’t have to write and submit the same story within the same week — although that’s what Bradbury did. Often it pays to set a story aside for a while and come back to it.
• The length of your story can be as short as Twitter fiction (140 characters) or as long as a novelette (15,000 words). Any style, any genre: whatever you write.
• Every week, we post a “check-in” where you can tell the world about your progress. Share your triumphs and disasters — we’re all in this together.

Obviously I am coming to this late, but I don’t see any harm in jumping in part way through. I know I won’t be able to keep up with the weekly challenge, so I will go for the monthly. Also, I still have to get my tax return (and a couple of others) done (the deadline in Canada is April 30), so I am aiming to start in May, and continue until December.

I am hoping this will give me the incentive I need to put a higher priority on my fiction writing, and hopefully get some published short stories I can put in my bio. Then I can stop calling myself a wannabe writer and call myself a writer 8^).

I know, some say that if I write I am a writer, whether I publish or not. Sorry but, while I can understand that viewpoint, I won’t feel like a real writer until I have something published for which I have been paid. To me it means I’ve achieved at least some basic level of skill, that someone was willing to pay me for it and put it out there under their banner.

In other words, I view “writer” as short-hand for “published writer”. Until then I’m just a hobbyist. We don’t call someone a plumber just because they installed a new faucet themselves. Or a carpenter because they banged together a not-too-shabby birdhouse. Being a writer means being in the profession of writing. Calling anyone who scribbles in a notebook a writer devalues the term. That’s my opinion, anyway.

I welcome your opinion. Please leave a comment.

P.S. About my blog posting schedule, I had been trying for twice a week, Monday and Thursday, but as you can see I’ve been having trouble sticking to it. Crafting (hopefully) good posts is taking more time than I expected. And I don’t want to annoy you with useless “no time to write a post” posts. So I am going to shoot for once a week on Mondays instead.