Of late, I have been writing this year’s A to Z blog, which, since 2019, has been 26 short stories themed on the alphabet.

Last year, when I was writing a particular story, I finished it and felt like there was more.

That’s when an idea hit me, and I started writing.  Some years, a particular story captures my attention, and I write another, which will come another of the 26, and rarely, I will write a third.

The thing is, it turned out to be a more interesting subject with a larger story, and as it began, I added chapters as the story developed in my mind, so that by the time November and NaNoWriMo arrived, it was almost a full-length novel.

By the way, NANOWRIMO is short for National Novel Writing Month.  It has a website, and the Writing Task, which is not a competition, is to write a novel of over 50,000 words over the 30 days of November.

I have done this for the last seven or eight years and managed to complete at least seven full-length novels.

Two of them so far have started as short stories, and I think there will be another this year.

The A to Z blog event is held in April and runs for 26 days, excluding Sundays.  Each blog entry is about a letter, starting with A.

In the first year, I did it with words. From then on, I decided to write short stories, starting with A is for: along with the title of the story.

So far, I have written nearly 250 short stories, of which about 20 have become what I call long short stories.