What This Is

Back in 2008, when Liana and I were active members on Critique Circle, a bunch of us had formed a little crit group (called, for perfectly good reasons that had nothing to do with our work habits, the Slackers). I think it was probably all precipitated by me moaning about my lack of ability to write a short story, but a couple of the members took it upon themselves to make a private queue where we all had to post a short story in response to prompts once a week. It lasted a couple of months, we had a blast, and although my short stories were neither consistently good nor consistently short, the whole exercise taught me the basics of short story writing well enough, and a couple of the pieces from that queue are ones I went on later (with much editing, in some cases) to publish.

Around New Year of 2013/14, I read The Curiosities, which if you like the stories posted here, go investigate it - much wonderfulness indeed, and written by authors infinitely more talented (than me, anyway :D). The Curiosities is a collection of short stories plucked from the Merry Fates blog, where a trio of authors set out to do pretty much exactly what we had been doing on 2008 on our queue: write a weekly piece of short fiction, sometimes in response to a prompt, sometimes not. They, unlike us, maintained the blog for over three years, and are now all seasoned published authors (and in at least one case an NYT-BS author), but in The Curiosities, they talk about how much the weekly writing challenge aided their writing and increased their skills.

Naturally, I didn't have enough on my plate, what with an interstate move, a new job, a two-year-old, no house to move into, and radioactive-iodine treatment scheduled for my thyroid - oh, and a non-fiction book under contract that I needed to finish drafting! - so I decided that I needed to do the same thing. It would keep me writing regularly (something I'd struggled with since commencing fulltime work in 2010 and having a baby in 2012), give me fodder for my blog (because let's face it, my relationship with blogging has ALWAYS been sporadic, despite good intentions), and hopefully improve my writing skills at the same time.

And naturally, because Liana is the most awesome twin on the planet, and because she also CLEARLY did not have enough on her plate (also including a two-year-old and an interstate move, plus three other kids and a whole bunch of other stuff, and a series of novellas to finish), I convinced her to agree, under the pretense of writing skills improvement. Apparently I neglected to mention in the first few conversations that the resulting pieces of weekly writing would be made available for public consumption. Oops. O:)

Either way, here we are, and here it is. The stories on here are rough, almost entirely unedited, and are sometimes probably pulled out of uncomfortable bodily places at the last minute when we have no clue what we're doing. Sometimes, that will show. Hopefully at least most of the time we can be entertaining. And mostly, hopefully we keep getting better.

Thanks for reading. Enjoy.

~ Amy (& Liana)