Gentlemen (and lady!), prepare your engines.

First things first: welcome our newest member, Skipernicus, known to some (including the IRS) as Mike Sonesen. Skip-dog was the feller who first introduced me to Mike Kaluta, without even knowing that Mr. K and I are almost relatives from Way Back When.

Skip's thrown down his first piece, and is now a Fellow of the Order of People Trying to Be Real Writers (or some such).

A brief history: Mike Brown and I conceived this project at Opal Divine's in Austin after a night of beer and darts. We had reached the point of the evening where thoughts turned deep and serious (or at least as deep as you're capable of after a pitcher or three of 1554) and we found common ground in our dissatisfaction with what we perceived as a lack of lasting achievement. We both found that we'd thought we had the chops to be writers if we ever got off our expanding duffs and did something about it, and thus the concept was born.

Initially the project was conducted via email; Mike and I would send each other a pic each day and commit to ten minutes of writing. Though we began by just opening the image and typing madly away, we both soon found that we were looking at the picture, then spending some time thinking about it. After a few weeks we discovered that we were starting to really think of each assignment as a short, contained piece (as opposed to the simple story-excerpt feeling we'd had with the early pieces).

Our initial notion evolved to where we would pick one story piece a week that we particularly liked, and flesh it out in outline form as if it were to be written up as a full story. Then, once a month, we would actually pick one of the outlines and go ahead and write that puppy up.

Noble dreams...sadly unseen. So far, only one of us (ahem) has finished a full short story, and perhaps the best thing that can be said about it is...it's finished.

So we've developed a new approach, one which we will premiere this coming week: since we appear to be intimidated by long-form pieces we are going to try to back into it instead. We will each pick a picture, one per person, and instead of writing ten minutes and being done, we are going to use that as the story basis for the entire week. Each day we will write ten MORE minutes continuing the story we started, and hopefully after a few iterations of this we'll be more comfortable with longer-form pieces.

Since we had a new member, no one expects that Skip will hop right into this (unless Skip wants to). Otherwise, starting Tuesday...long form begins!