About Us
Many readers have asked why the website is called 500 Ironic Stories when there are not 500 stories available to read. Ironic, isn’t it? This project is a work in progress. The goal is to not only produce 500 original short stories, but to evaluate them in real time with reader feedback. While this is kind of a scary idea, it also seems radical enough to be worth trying. Internet users are used to rating things, so why not use instant feedback from many readers to create better stories?
You may wonder how long it will take to create 500 stories. The plan is to post one new story per week. With 52 weeks in a year, you can do the math. Of course, if things really get rolling, more than one story might get posted per week, but writing 500 stories is still a long term prospect. And by the way, 500 was something of an arbitrary number. It’s large enough to sound substantial but not impossible. And while 500 is an area code in Iowa, it’s a three-digit number that people don’t automatically associate with a particular area code.
Who is writing the stories? So far, all the stories have been written by one person – Aaron Hawkins. That’s me, so let me switch to first-person for the rest of this page and I’ll even include a picture of myself at the bottom. By day I am an engineering professor, but at night a tortured author. I got serious about writing after publishing my first novel, The Year Money Grew on Trees, in 2010. Since then, I have seen big shifts in the publishing world. The internet makes it easy to take your work “directly to the people.” This project is my attempt to do just that with short stories.
Why 500 Ironic Stories? Why not 500 Scary Stories or 500 Love Stories? My college roommate and I used to joke that, “Life always follows the most ironic path.” He passed away too young very recently, so in some ways this project is also a tribute to him. I’ve always felt that appreciating irony is a measure of consciousness. Irony keeps us guessing and laughing when things don’t quite turn out like we expect. Irony is easy to spot and ironic stories are easy to tell. They are the low hanging fruit of the short story world. But 500 Scary Stories sounds good too. Someone should get to work on that.
If you are thinking, “I love reading 500 Ironic Stories and I want to help keep the stories coming,” at this point, you can do several things:
- Rate the stories you read
- Tell your Friends
- Send feedback in addition to your star ratings to the contact email. If you have suggestions for a great ironic story, I would love to hear from you.
