Once upon a time, there was a blog.

It was just a little slip of a blog, but it was growing. Slowly but surely, it grew bigger with new posts ever day. People found the blog, from search results and social media links. Traffic grew from a tiny trickle to a steady, if small, stream.

Like most blogs, this blog had a writer. She had challenged herself to put time and effort into the blog, to see what might happen. Emboldened by the steady, small stream of success, she began to think of ways to make the blog even better. She wanted to make it a digital space where people wanted to spend their time, where they could learn new things and think about the world in new ways.

One day in October, as she saw an email about NaNoWriMo—National Novel-Writing Month—the blog writer thought to herself “Boy, I don’t want to write a novel during the month of November, but I sure do want to become a better storyteller.”

In that moment, #storyvember was born.

During the month of November, the blog writer decided, every single blog post would be in the form of a story. Some might be true, others might be fiction. Some might be parables, and others might be weird or practical. There were no rules, other than she had to write a blog post every day, and it had to be in the form of a story.

She knew this would be a difficult challenge—something that she had never done before. All her best writing had been non-fiction, something that was story-tinged but not story-focused.

Still, she was ready. It was time for a new challenge, one that would force her to grow and change and learn.

On the first day of November, our blog writer took a deep breath and wrote a story. You’re reading it now. It’s not particularly polished or insightful, and it certainly isn’t a thing of great beauty, but it conveyed the message of #storyvember and that’s what counts.