Pencil forced to write
Can you crank out poems at will?
A timeless vision

In the midst of midterms, protests, programming, TAing, grading, rehearsal, and restoration of hacked websites (...), I've decided to add one more (small) piece to my life. Remember @VeryShortStories? The idea was cool enough to make me want to try some, and unlike full stories or even Ensorcelled-sized short stories, these are of a convenient size such that even if they're not that good, they won't take too long to come up with.

So. In the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I designate March 2010 to be JoMoWriPoShoSto, or Jordy's Month for Writing Poems and Short Stories—one a day. The haiku above (written some time last year) questions whether this is possible, but for me it is (even if some are bad). Most of these will probably be very short stories, but it'd be cool to cover everything from six-word stories to multilingual haiku. I'm hoping to even try a newspaper blackout poem some time this month (maybe over spring break.

Here's the catch. I'm not posting any of them.

Unless, that is, you post an equivalent short work to me. This is a challenge to stir up friends' creative juices. For each person who posts a poem/VSS/etc. to me, I'll post one of my March works back to them. At the end of the month, I'll post all of my work and what's been received.

I am still not (usually) going to do more than one piece per day, so if I get multiple responses on one day I'll spread them out over the coming days. And to get more people involved, each friend only gets to make one response per calendar week (starting Monday, since that's March 1st). Of course, I'd love to see more, and I might post some extras if I have them anyway.

Fifteen minutes of self-enforced creativity a day? Totally worth it. Are you willing to join me?

"Too late!" Matt gasped. He reached the bridge just in time to see the splash.

Posted by chigaijin | 28 Feb 2010 13:48:50

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Happy Year of the Tiger!

I don't know if I explained this before, but every (solar) new year I send nengajō (new years' cards) to my past Japanese teachers. It's fun! Anyway, here's mine from this year. It has a tiger and says "kinga shinnen", which is a more formal "Happy New Year".

Tomorrow I will ask my Vietnamese-speaking friends how to pronounce chúc mừng năm mới, since I can already do 新年快乐.

Posted by chigaijin | 14 Feb 2010 11:56:18

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It's almost November, and you know what that means...

NaNoWriMo!

For those of you who don't know, NaNoWriMo is a month-long international endeavour in which thousands of people all agree they're going to write 50,000-word stories by the end of the year. I've twice now participated and "won" (i.e. made it to 50K before the deadline), and I can say it's pretty awesome—at the very least, for the rest of your life you get to say you wrote a novel. And the write-ins—scheduled events where you go to a café or someplace and hang out with other NaNo writers—are just plain fun, even if you don't get your peak writing done there.

Only...this is the semester where I'm consistently getting less sleep than I need. Where I'm already triaging responsibilities. Where I have a show the first week of November. Where I have two large CS projects to do during November. Where I haven't even felt like I've had time to respond to e-mails from my mom. How can I add a 50,000-word novel—a little over two pages a day—into that?

Basically, I've realized that I can't. It's just not feasible. But, like performance, I don't want to just give up writing this semester. So instead, I'm going to work on a short story idea I had over the summer, perhaps moving on to a second idea I had (today, actually) if I finish the first one. If this is an estimate of nine to fifteen thousand words, that's only 300-500 words a day. A page or less. And with weekends figured in, that might be doable.

Or maybe I'll even fall short of that. I'm certainly not making it to many write-ins this year. The point is to be writing! So, I encourage everyone reading this to consider joining me and thousands of other crazy people, in doing whatever sort of creative endeavour you've wanted to try, or always meant to do but never got around to doing, or never thought you'd actually do. 50,000 words is awesome, but if you'd rather do 30K, 10K, a poem a day, a comic book...go for it!

As for me, we'll see. But for now?

It's on.

Posted by chigaijin | 23 Oct 2009 23:57:22

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The terrestrial planets are small,
not very massive but dense,
close to the Sun and have few moons.
They have rocky outer parts and iron cores.

– A. Filippenko, slide CS-95, fall 2009

The Jovian planets are large, massive
but not very dense, far from the Sun,
and have many moons. They are
mostly liquid, but have rock/iron
cores. They rotate rapidly.

– A. Filippenko, slide CS-111, fall 2009

Posted by chigaijin | 26 Sep 2009 19:45:42

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Dinosaur Comics has recently had a string of randomizer-related posts — because every strip has the same form, they can be mashed up in extremely flexible ways. The latest is to take a random Twitter post and DC second panel and put them together...and someone subsequently wrote a script to do that. Result: potential for hilarity?

This one came up on my first try. Well, technically my second, since one loaded on the DC page itself.

Real updates ought to start up again soon. The summer's been very busy!

Posted by chigaijin | 17 Aug 2009 21:41:22

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