The 2020 July Short Story Challenge – Day by Day

For starters, Smashwords is currently having its annual summer sale, where you can get plenty of e-books at reduced prices or for free, including several of mine.

In other news, blogging will be light this month, because I’m currently doing the July Short Story Challenge again.

What is the July Short Story Challenge, you ask? Well, in July 2015, Dean Wesley Smith announced that he was planning to write a brand new short story every day during the month of July. The original post seems to be gone now, but the Wayback Machine has a copy here. At the time, several people announced that they would play along, so I decided to give it a try as well. And then I did it again the following year. And the next. And the next. If you want to read my post-mortems of the previous July short story challenges, here are the posts for 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019.

Because I’ve already done the July short story challenge five years in a row now and always found the experience very rewarding, I’m aiming for a repeat this year. Though for now, I’m only committing to doing this for a week, which is already half over. If things are going well, I’ll keep going, though I’m not sure if I can do the entire July this year, because Worldcon is at the end of the month and that will eat up my time and attention.

In previous years, I’ve always done a post-mortem post about the July Short Story Challenge in August. Last year, I also started keeping a running tally of all stories written to date right here on this blog to hold myself accountable. It worked well and so I will do it again this year and will update this post for every new story. This tally will be very basic, listing just the date, title, word count, genre, series, if any, and maybe a one or two sentence summary/comment.

Most of these stories will become longer in editing. Many will eventually change their titles and some may never see the light of day at all.

If you want to follow along with the challenge, bookmark this post. And if you want to play along or cheer me on, feel free to do so in the comments.

And now, let’s take a look at the stories:

July 1, 2020: Recruitment, military science fiction, 4778 words

Craig Hammer is a frustrated military science fiction writer. One day, he sees an advertisement for the International Independent Military Science Fiction Writers Guild, IIMSFWG for short. He joins up and finds friends. But the Guild is not what it seems.

This one started out as a parody inspired by a discussion on Camestros Felapton’s blog about yet another would-be SFWA alternative. Eventually, it turned into a more serious science fiction story. There’s even a sweet romance in here.

July 2, 2020: Jamaica Jerk Chicken (The Culinary Assassin), crime fiction, 1178 words

The Culinary Assassin is a series of flash stories about an assassin who kills people in restaurant – after first sampling the food. I wrote the first one to practice my description writing skills and then they sort of piled up. I should really publish a collection of these some time, since I have quite a few of them by now.

In this story, the world’s only gourmet hitperson eats Caribbean food and shoots a drug dealer. Inspired by having jerk chicken for lunch.

July 3, 2020: The Hand from the Deep (Thurvok), sword and sorcery, 3923 words

Thurvok and his friends liberate a village that is beleaguered by a monster that lives at the bottom of a lake.

Inspired by a favoured hiking spot and a book about mythological creatures.

July 4, 2020: Stark’s Diner (The Culinary Assassin), crime fiction, 1309 words

The world’s only gourmet hitperson eats an ice cream sundae and shoots a mobster in a diner in New Jersey.

The inspiration for this story was that I recently ran across yet another discussion about the controversial final scene of The Sopranos, where Tony Soprano gets killed – or not, whatever the case may be – to the sound of “Don’t stop believin'” by Journey. As I came across the umpteenth dissection of the ending, I suddenly remembered that the scene in question takes place in a diner. And I thought, “Wait a minute, so Tony Soprano was killed – if that’s what happened – in a diner. It’s obvious who done it. It was the culinary assassin.”

And that’s how this story was born, though I changed the name of the victim and the diner.

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