A little gift for you

Happy belated Koloss Head-Munching day!

For those who don't know, Koloss Head-Munching day is what we call Brandon Sanderson's birthday, and it's mostly important because that's when he releases his State of the Sanderson blog post where he shares his updates on the year that passed and the plans for the year to come.

Brandon Sanderson is my favorite author, and he's the one that gave me the inspiration to try my hand at writing as a hobby, which is something I had started doing 2 years ago and I loved it.

On that first year, I attempted to outline and write a novel for which I had an idea that I thought was interesting and I've learned a bit of the craft of writing at the same time. Last year though, I had stopped and decided to write a short story instead in order to practice my hand at writing, because it's easier to write a short story and polish it, than to try and do that for an entire novel. I wrote "Kill the Human", and I've released it in last year's post here on patreon on the Koloss Head-Munching day 2019.

That story was still sort of in a draft state, written a bit in freestyle and just silly and written for fun, and it was 15000 words (so a novelette, not a short story). I decided later to try something even shorter which I could really polish in order to improve the craft. So in January 2020, I chose a subject from a contest about climate change which was happening on Scribophile (a site for writing) and wrote a short story about that. Making sure to limit it to under 3000 words was in itself quite a challenge and I learned a lot during that time with all the feedback I received on Scribophile.

The story is called "A day to remember", and the central theme is Climate Change. It has a little bit of scifi/futuristic elements in it, but at its heart, it's a story about connection and if it leaves you with feeling some kind emotion (other than boredom), then it did its job.

It won 8th place in that contest (not bad for my second attempt at writing a story), and I wanted to try and get it published in some magazine or something, but with the crazy year we've had, I barely had any time to find where to submit and I only sent it to 5 magazines I think, which all ended in rejections (but one had a personalized message about why it was rejected and how to improve the story, so that's a great success 🥳!)

This week, I took that story out of the dusty attic and re-read it, then cleaned it up a little with some things I wasn't totally happy with and made it ready for release here.

I'm still so very busy with everything in my life, and I don't have any time for my hobbies anymore (other than software development). This means that I didn't get to make any progress at all on my novel/writing since I wrote this in January. I'm hoping next year will be a bit more relaxed and different. I expect to write my own "State of KaKaRoTo" by the end of the month to revisit what I did this year and what I plan on doing for the next year.

That's enough ramblings from me. Here's the attached story A day to Remember, Read it, enjoy it (or not) and comment (or not)!

Happy holidays everyone, and I wish 2021 will be a better year for everyone!

Thanks,

KaKaRoTo