READERSVOICE.COM: Where are you based in Canada and what’s your daily routine, what with uploading two 50-stories a day and any other activities?

TIM SEVENHUYSEN: I live in Edmonton, Alberta, where I moved my family a couple of years ago from Vancouver Island, BC. It’s a cold, snowy winter right now, but we’ve had a bit of a warm spell that gives us hope to endure a few more months until spring!

My routine for managing 50WS is usually to schedule stories during my lunch break at work. I write personal responses to every submission, and I always try to explain why I’m not publishing a story when I send rejections, so it’s somewhat time-consuming, but completely worth it. I wish I were ahead of the game and could have stories scheduled a week or more in advance, but with two toddlers at home it’s hard to find the free time to put myself ahead. On the weekends I review the past week to choose the Story of the Week winner

RV: Was it difficult coming up with a story a day for the first couple of years, when you were contributing most of the stories and where did find the stories or come up with ideas?

TS: As the site’s main author for the first three years, with occasional “guest” stories, I had to find a lot of inspiration from a lot of different places. Sometimes I would look to my daily life for little events or ideas that I could turn into a story, and sometimes I just sat and thought for a while to see what would come into my head. Over time I started to turn to Twitter quite a bit to request prompts or story titles to base stories around, and that worked really well. It helped that I had a relatively sizeable Twitter following already because of my past involvement with the LoadingReadyRun sketch comedy group (loadingreadyrun.com).

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– copyright Simon Sandall