James Farner and the 30/30 Challenge

An acquaintance of mine spoke to me on Facebook and mentioned the prospect of completing a 30/30 challenge for the month of April. Intrigued by the whole idea, I looked into it and decided to give it a try.

Now for those of you who don’t know what the 30/30 challenge is, let me introduce you to it. The 30/30 challenge comes in a lot of forms. If you type it into Google you might find this version of the 30/30 writing challenge. In this case, they’re raising money for charity and the goal is to write for 30 minutes per day.

But that’s not much of a challenge for me (totally arrogant) because I already do that. And my acquaintance felt that was the case for the writers in our little group too. Instead, this is based around short stories.

We will aim to create a single short story every day. We’re aiming to have them reach a minimum of 3k words. Again, I do this anyway, so personally I’m going to be doing that and working on my novels. That’s a real challenge for me because it’s consistent writing at a level I’ve never attempted before.

So what am I going to be writing?

Coming up with 30 short story ideas isn’t an easy thing to do. I still have a Made in Yorkshire short story to write, so that’s going to be my priority.

After that I think I’m going to go back to a period of history I fell in love with years ago. Renaissance Italy in the city of Fiorenza (Florence) inspires me both for its political, economic, and artistic tributes. The way art drives forward this powerful republic is something rarely seen throughout human history. For once, it’s about colour and stone, rather than gold mined from the earth.

That’s going to cover about ten short stories. Eventually I’ll release them one-by-one, before throwing them into a boxset. I want to make them as standalone as possible, whilst creating links between them. It’s a difficult project to get right, but I hope it turns out well.

I’m updating my progress here a couple of times, along with daily updates on Twitter at @farnerauthor and on my Facebook page, so join me there and see how I get on!

Until next time…

James Farner