PARANOIA

Congratulations to PARANOIA mission designer Dan Curtis Johnson as he nears the end of his year-long exercise in sustained microfiction, straightforwardly called "Write Something Every Day." Dan, who has designed many fine missions (including "Mister Bubbles," "Stealth Train," and "Hunger") and has scripted dozens of comics (Dan's bibliography), resolved on New Year's Day 2010 to write new fiction each day for a year and post it to his LiveJournal, Scribbles and Lies.

"Someday, I'd like to get back into writing professionally, even if only on the side," Dan says -- he's a quality manager in Software Engineering at Apple in Cupertino, California -- "but to do so I have to make myself write -- no matter what -- when I have the time. So I wanted to see if I could train sheer force-of-will into overcoming writer's block."

Dan achieved what he modestly calls "reasonably good results": 175,000 words of entertaining reading, mostly in short laser-focused bursts. (Several dozen entries are exactly and explicitly 100 words long; my favorites include the inventive 11-part series Hell Frozen Over.) As for PARANOIA referents, any Troubleshooter who has climbed a small mountain of CPU paperwork (or endured a Humanist secret society meeting) may appreciate the fussy bureaucratic AIs of Dan's five-part Landmine Nation story.

Dan says, "Though I did miss a few days, pretty much all of them were because either I was sick, one of my kids was sick, or I was out of town away from computers and things to write on. The results were about as uneven as any prolific body of work, I expect; sometimes it's good and sometimes it's just words.

"One really positive side effect is that, along the way, I dragged around half a dozen pieces of unfinished short story work that had been languishing on my hard drive (in some cases, as much as twenty full years) and finally finished them. The desperate need to have something, anything, made me go back and cannibalize past work really effectively at times." Just last week Dan finished a piece he'd made notes on in February: "HalfLANG," about a language for the lucrative market of hobbit programmers. Reddit picked up the link, and now 45,000 people have read it, making it the year's most popular piece.

Other highlights: "Fade Away" (March 26), a hundred-word ghost-tech story that desperately needs a novella-length expansion; "Getting Paid" (October 15), which reads like Act 1 of a Tim Allen movie; and "Triage" (December 8), a note-perfect zombie tale. I liked Dan's May 19 entry so much that (with his permission) I made it a poster and put it up as a free download on the document-sharing site Scribd: Before You X, Make Sure Y.

Does Dan's example inspire you? "In case anyone decides to try this particular nutjobbery, there are three things I'd do differently," he says, "all of which can be summarized as 'I really should have been publicizing it, and myself, the whole time.'

1. "I would have tweeted a short link to each day's new story after it was posted." [Dan is @dcurtisj on Twitter.]
2. "I would have added a line specifying 'Write Something New Every Day is a 365-day project by Dan Curtis Johnson' with a copyright reminder.
3. "I would have written a pre-dated January 1st post explaining the project, so that it would always appear at the very top of the first page of my main LJ.

"In short, I am crappy at promoting myself, and it's only now at the end I realize what I should have been doing from the start."

What's next? "I'll assemble some sort of anthology book out of the 2010 pieces for publication. Then I intend to edit an existing sort-of-novel that I wrote a few years back, get it into publishable shape. And I am going to try to pitch comics on a regular basis in 2011.

"But all of those things come after January 1st, a day on which I am going to write absolutely nothing whatsoever. Man, that is going to be great."