Writing short stories

Every night I struggle to fall asleep.  I think I just have too much going on in my head.  There are some things that I do to help me fall asleep.  I take over the counter meds and I listen to audiobooks at a very low level (the first Harry Potter book is my favorite).

The idea behind the the audio book is my mind can focus on the story and I can concentrate on trying to listen to the story that my mind is allowed to drift off to sleep.  This works pretty well, but I tend to wake up entangled in the headphones.  Not a great solution.
There is another method that I will sometimes use.  The idea is that I create stories in my mind.  Most of the time I am playing the main character. These stories, or scenarios, are always fiction and mostly tend to be science fiction.  There are times when I can  control time or time stops when I sleep.  There are stories when I am an undercover agent of some ancient deity, who as bestowed upon me special powers.  There are stories when I am a computer hacker, playing the part of a modern day robin hood.

The point being that I have a mind full of these ideas.  Yes they are pretty rough but they still exist.  So I want to put them on paper (or what counts for paper these days).  The answer: short stories.  I want to write some short stories. Simple right?

Now we come to one of the major flaws of my personality.  Well really there are two that are coming to play.  The first being I tend to not finish large projects.  I will start them and then lose interest and not finish them.  The second being that I tend not to try new things if I think there is a chance I might fail.  Yes I know those are both pretty silly things to stop me from trying something new.

That is why I am making a promise here in this blog post.  I will add this to my New Years post.  The promise being I will write one short story a month for 2013.  That means 12 short stories.  Feel free to ask me about my monthly story.  The goal will not to create a series of master pieces but to get some practice in.

I have the creativity in me.  I has always been there. I just need to exercise it a bit.  Let it get out and straight the legs.  Flex the muscles if you will.  I am headed out of town at the end of the month to see some family (nice long family road trip) and I will probably be finishing the first then.  Look for it at the end of the month.

**Update** I was doing some research on short stories and I will define my short stories being between 4000-7500 words.  I have to set this guideline so I do not get in the habit of writing short short stories (or flash fiction)