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Monthly Archives April 2009

1 – I woke up on Wednesday

When I awoke, it took me some time to figure out what was wrong.

Well, there was no alarm, that was one thing. Not being a morning person, waking up to silence  usually indicates that I’ve long overslept and the clock radio has given up its futile task.

No, it was something else. Not just that I was uncomfortable, either, lying on my back with arms to my sides in that peaceful pose that only corpses can be put into for any length of time without cramping.

I began to roll over, drifting back beneath the surface again, sleep a warm sea welcoming me home. Mid-roll, my forehead came into sharp contact with something cold and hard, and the delicious warmth of unconsciousness was jerked away from me to the accompaniment of a multitude of very wrong sensations. Of course my forehead hurt, but also something had wrapped around my arm and was pulling at me painfully. Blankets were twisted strangely around my legs, and there was the distinct and disconcerting smell of cucumbers.  For a moment I hung in that twilight space between dream and awake, where you are not quite sure if things are real or not. I saw strange images, some other room, some bed not my own, blinking lights, strange blankets twisted around my legs.

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Posted 30 April 2009 § 52 § Prose ‡ Comments (0)

52

I haven’t written in a while. But I have a plan.

This is inspired by Flickr’s “365 days” project, and more specifically by the work of Arashi, whose work I watched flourish as she took photo after photo, day after day. Though it may seem the height of narcissism and self-aggrandizement to take a self-portrait every day for a year, the true value in the challenge was the enforced practice – every day she had to come up with an idea, do the work to set it up, and put light to lens. There was no room for endless seeking after perfection. No time to tinker endlessly.  Instead of nursing one or two treasured ideas, never producing work because those ideas were always in the process of being made perfect, she had to shoot and move on. Incidentally, her photography went from quite good to spectacular over the course of all that practice and exploration of the medium

So what does one do if one’s craft is writing rather then photography (and incidentally, if one doesn’t show up on film for some reason the doctors can’t quite explain)? Well, a story a day for a year seems unrealistic. But what about a story a week? 52 stories, 7 days each. No perfection, no endless tinkering. No cherished ideas held on pedestals to the detriment of a thousand other ideas.

The rules:

  1. 7 days. The first story doesn’t count, it just starts the counter, but a story must be posted every Thursday night, before midnight, for 52 weeks.
  2. Complete stories. They can be related, they can be sequels, but every story must stand on its own, and be understood as an independent work.
  3. No off-the-shelf prose. Stories have to be original, written within the given week. No using beginnings, endings, or scenes from previously written work. Old ideas are ok, but all text must be originally written within the week.

They aren’t all going to be good. Honestly, a lot of them are going to be crap. But I hope they will improve, and that the enforced writing will carve habits into my daily life so that I am writing constantly, rather than thinking constantly of things I ought to write.

We’ll see.

Posted 30 April 2009 § 52 § Prose ‡ Comments (3)