I’ve got a couple weeks vacation coming up around the holidays, and I want to use it to do something I haven’t had much time to do lately: write fiction. I have very bad fiction-writing habits, which actually turns out to be good in this case. Read on to find out why.

When I have an idea for a story I get really excited about it, and I write a first vignette, either from the beginning of the story or from some iconic scene that’s popped into my head. The bad part is I often let the snippet collect dust while I move on to the next shiny idea. That means I’ve got a lot of those snippets around, and no real buy-in to any of them beyond the fact that I’d like to eventually finish ONE of them, or at least make more progress than I have.

That’s where you come in. Over the next week I’m going to be posting excerpts from four stories and asking you to vote on which one you’d like me to flesh out over the Christmas holidays. I will attempt to post substantive updates to each story every day during the holidays, although we all know that I’m not likely to hit that goal 100% of the days.

The fiction will be (is) rough, but maybe I need to get over my fear of writing something other than pristine final drafts. This might do it, or it might expose me as a fraud of a writer…either way, I’ll have learned something and you’ll have been entertained. So join me this week as I unleash some fiction your way, and make sure to vote in the poll that I’ll put up after the final snippet is up.

It’s possible some of them will be too long for a single post, so make sure to look for multi-part posts. I’ll always link to subsequent parts, or at least warn you that one is coming so you can either wait to read it all, or come back to see the part you’ve missed.

Thanks, and this should be fun!