March Books: 1/5 (The Murder at World’s End)
February is always such an interesting month. It’s short, but sometimes it feels long. Like, I got a lot done in February (and dealt with a lot of crap this year as well) this year. Most of my class (still working on that last section) got done, most of a book of writing exercises, enough books (February traditionally comes up short in that regard). I’d say that I was just as if not more productive than I typically am in a month.
Now we’re four days into March, and it feels like all my momentum got eaten. Funny how that works.
(Also I smashed my finger in a drawer this morning, which is unfortunate.)
Writing-wise, I do need to finish my class, and I also need to write the short stories I’m prepping for said class. I’ve started a new writing book, Consider This by Chuck Palahniuk. So far he offers writing advice but it doesn’t have the built in exercises Ursula Le Guin’s book did.
I think I mentioned this last week, but I’m also considering working on a kind of found footage sort of story using random paper people left at work. I’m an office administrator in my day job, and people feel like they can just donate notebooks or office supplies that they don’t want any more, often by just leaving them on my desk with a note.
(Generally I am pro-notebook, but sometimes they donate dozens at a time, or a lot of really strange supplies that no one is actually going to use.)
A few weeks ago I got a bag on my desk of small notebooks, index cards, and what I can only assume are cards meant to be used in a card catalog or rolodex. Functionally useless, from a work standpoint, but it feels wasteful to just recycle the lot of it, so since I don’t have book-based exercises anymore, I thought I might do a card a day for some sort of story.
The cards look like this:
and they’re about 3×5 inches. (This is maybe a third of them in the picture, so there is room for creativity.)
I’ve been watching some YouTube videos about found footage horror so I like the idea of doing something along those lines, like notes between people in some sort of circumstance of which I do not know as of yet. Or maybe I’ll just write bits of a story on it, a little bit each day, as a warm up.
And then I can tie them together, I don’t know.
(Seriously, what is the hole for? People who are more experienced with card catalogs/rolodexes, is this what you used for them? How old are these cards?)
That’s kind of on the backburner for now, until I figure out some other things, but I guess if a story idea comes to me we can get going on that.
That’s the plan, anyway. What are your plans for March?
