In Today’s Journal
* Quote of the Day
* What’s Your Word (or Phrase) for 2026?
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quote of the Day
“Don’t live the same year 75 times and call it a life.” Robin Sharma
What’s Your Word (or Phrase) for 2026?
It’s a new year!
I know. Doesn’t your gut just sink when the writer of an article wastes your time telling you what you already know?
But here we are. And we’re all fiction writers or would-be fiction writers. (Oops, there I go again.)
Anyway, for some of us, me included, it’s time to pull up our big-boy or big-girl pants, decide what we’re passionate about, and set our priorities according to those passions.
I mean initially. You know. You can always change your priorities again as the week, month, and year unfold.
In Of Interest today the writers over at Writers in the Storm tell everyone what their individual word is to guide their writing journey in 2026.
I won’t give you my personal opinion of the words they chose. Not my place. Suffice it to say I’m not big on ‘giving myself permission’ to do something. I’d rather use that time to just do it.
I’m also not personally wild about feel-good affirmations, especially those that contain the word ‘universe’. Again, just get on with it. But that’s just me. If stuff like that works for you, hey, knock yourself out.
My own personal truth is that of all the people on Earth, the only one who really cares either way how I spend my time is the guy in the mirror. Well, and maybe the relatively few humans and domesticated animals I have the ability to help or harm.
But I seriously doubt that any other beings or ‘forces’ in the universe or the universe itself even know I’m here, much less care what I do with my time. And frankly, that’s a very freeing thought.
No Overlords (sorry, A.S.) means I’m on my own, and I feel pretty free in that concept. I can do whatever I actually want to do and then celebrate (or suffer) the consequences. Either way, it’s all my own fault.
When I read the title of the article I linked to in Of Interest, a word sprang to mind. It wasn’t an epiphany or an affirmation or anything like that. It was a simple statement of guiding fact, and as such it’s boring: The word was Write.
That’s also the same word that I’ve used as a guide ever since I started doing all this inconsequential storytelling stuff in earnest back in early 2014.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I’ve been telling stories (and later, writing) since I stood up in a plastic padded chair that was part of a lemon-yellow dinette set when I was probably two years old, swiped a slice of bacon off my plate and held it behind my back, then proclaimed to my parents, “Bacon gone.”
I put my first short story on paper when I was six. Several years and a few dozen stories later, I was in my senior year of high school.
My English teacher, Mrs. Chandler, dressed in brown pumps and a purplish-brown dress covered with small white flowers, was passing along our desks handing back the graded short stories she’d assigned a few days before.
But the single sheet of paper she laid on my desk simply read Please stay after class.
As the classroom doors closed behind the last students, I smiled, gathered my books under one arm, and approached her desk.
Mrs. Chandler held up my short story, peered at me over glasses that had slid halfway down her nose, and said, “You plagiarized this, didn’t you?”
I frowned. What? “No ma’am, I didn’t plagiarize it.”
A brief discussion ensued. For the record, my story wasn’t a ‘take-off’ of anyone else’s story or anything like that either. It was all mine.
But nothing I said over a period of maybe ten minutes could change her mind.
She finally slapped the story to her desk, said, “Well, the story itself deserves an A, but you certainly don’t. Plagiarism is wrong.” Then she marked a D on the upper right corner of the first page of the story, handed it to me, and told me to go home and think about what I’d done.
Shrug. Okay. But as we were taught back then, I only said, “Yes ma’am.” Story in hand, I turned away.
And grinned ear to ear. I was almost giddy with delight. For a moment, I was certain I’d died and gone to Heaven.
I was still grinning as the classroom door latched behind me. I didn’t care either way about the stupid grade. In her certainty that I’d plagiarized the story, she’d paid me the highest possible compliment.
Looking back, my ‘guiding word’ from the time I was six or seven until early 2014 was ‘Language’. I was thrilled with everything about our language, from how little lines and arcs go together to form letters to how words go together to form sentences and communication and all that.
Flash forward.
After my 21 year civilian-appreciation course ended in 1991, I finally attended college. But I also started teaching classes and seminars and sessions at writers’ conferences about the English language and its nuances and rhythms and flow.
But there was a problem. I was great at language and its nuances, but I was a Stage 1 fiction writer. I could write my butt off (I thought) but everything was about Language: Words. Sentences.
I didn’t know or think about Story until I happened across Dean Wesley Smith again in early 2014 (I was 61 at the time) and found the major epiphany that was and is Heinlein’s Rules and Writing Into the Dark.
Suddenly Story was everything.
And that’s when my guiding word shifted from ‘Language’ to ‘Write’. That’s also when my focus shifted from words, sentences, and paragraphs to Story. And I’ve never looked back.
Do I get things wrong and fail? Sure. But if I don’t keep writing and finagling the language and exploring its nuances, I won’t learn and improve my craft. I won’t get things right and succeed.
So in that way (and as Dean has said many times), the only true failure is giving up and not writing at all. Every word you put on the page in pursuit of Story is a success.
No matter the specifics of ‘process,’ there are only two ways to write fiction:
- You can don white robes and ascend into an ivory tower from which you control the events and characters of the story you’re constructing block by careful block, or
- You can slip into sneakers, jeans, and a t-shirt, roll off the parapet and into the trenches, and run through the characters’ authentic story with the characters as the story events and the characters’ reactions unfold all around you.
I’ve done both.
In the former, your focus will necessarily be on words and sentences.
In the latter, your focus will be on what actually happens in the story as it happens and how the characters react as they react. You’ll barely notice the words and sentences as they flash past.
The first way is sheer labor. The second is sheer fun.
But as always, the choice is yours. I offer this only as something you might want to ponder.
So what’s your ‘guiding word or phrase’ for 2026?
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
One Word to Guide Your Writing Journey in 2026
Twenty-Five of the Best Opening Lines of 2025 This was introduced in a special edition of Dr. Mardy Grothe’s Quotes of the Week.
The Numbers
The Journal………………….. 1270
Mentorship Words…………….. 0
Total Nonfiction…………………. 1270
Writing of
Day 1…… XXXX words. To date………… XXXXX
Fiction for January……………………… XXXX
Fiction for 2026…………………………… XXXX
Nonfiction for January.………………… 1270
Nonfiction for 2026………………..……… 1270
2026 consumable words………………… 1270
2026 Novels to Date…………………….. 0
2026 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2026 Short Stories to Date……………… 0
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 123
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 310
Short story collections……………………. 29