Whew…it’s been quite a month! Thanks to Lily (Minute after Midnight) I’ve spent the last 31 days posting various creations for NaCreSoMo. Different people had different goals for this event; mine was to try many different forms of media, rather than sticking to my usual short poetry. Did it work?

1. “Haha Punctuation” - wordplay, poetry
2. “仕方 (Shikata) - guitar, Japanese, existing project
3. “The Exodus” - vignette (first person)
4. “Interpreting Information” - pen and paper, CS
5. Flyers - GIMP (image editor), photos, puns
6. “Broccoli Fighting” - pencil and paper, Korean
7. Chris’s Simple Visual Futuristic Sports Scoring System - CoffeeScript, HTML canvas
8. “Promise” - guitar, rap, existing project
9. “A Slightly Different Yellow Submarine” - rap and a ridiculous excess of iambic pentameter
10. Flowers for Algernon adaptation - stage script, existing piece
11. Ambigrams - GIMP (image editor), text
12. “本当の大人 (Hontou no Otona)” - guitar, Japanese
13. “Sisters” - screenplay, fanfiction
14. Self-Descriptive Poetry - poetry
15. “Inkblot” - CoffeeScript, game, existing project
16. Mashup sketch - a cappella, multi-track
17. “Reciprocity” - poetry
18. “Obscure Alternatives to Duologues” - pencil and paper, puns
19. “Mask of Lies” - vignette (first person), fanfiction
20. “On Creation” - blog post
21. “A City on a Lake” - GIMP (image editor), digital paint
22. Smarter Site Navigation - Ruby, blog software
23. Chicken Tikka Masala - stove
24. “Watershed” - a cappella, multi-track
25. Script for “When the World Stops Spinning” - music video script
26. “Mental Castles” - story (third person), description
27. “Mental Castles, Part II” - story (third person)
28. “Mental Castles, Part III” - story (third person)
29. Text Adventure - Lolcode, game
30. Status Update - riddle poem
31. NaCreSoMo Tribute - Motion (visual effects), kinetic typography

It’s not quite something different every day, but I think I did pretty well. That said, it was a fairly exhausting month. I’d like to keep posting, but maybe aim for one new thing a week, instead of every day. I’ll also get back to movie reviews and other opinion posts, rather than focusing on various “creative” works.

(By the way, if you’ve been following my posts from the link Lily’s master table, this will be the last post tagged “NaCreSoMo 2013”. You can keep up with my regular posts on my homepage.)

I want to thank Lily for setting this whole thing up, because it actually worked. It took a while to get started, but Part I of “Mental Castles” is more descriptive than anything I’ve done in a long time. “Watershed” is just a sketch, but it’s actually my first time ever multi-tracking anything a cappella (unless you count the mashup sketch a week earlier), despite having done a cappella on and off since high school. I’m really happy with the way the final tribute video came out. And “Inkblot“…oh man, I’d really like to finish this one some day, but it’s so much more doable now. A year and a half ago I visualized a game, and now I’ve actually made it.

Another great part of this month has been seeing everyone else’s posts, friends who I already knew were creative but never shared what they made, friends who had ideas but never wrote them down, and friends who had talents I never expected.¹ Thanks for your comments, for your creative posts…and for your inspiration; about a third of my Creations came from others’ posts and conversations. And with all the awesome multi-part stories that were started…well, I hope they do get finished, because I’m hooked for all of them!

I think I was the only one who posted something every day, though more than a few of my posts were cop-outs, at least by my standards. But that wasn’t the point. Pretty much everyone Created and posted several more Things than they would have otherwise, and that’s a good thing.

Thanks, Lily. Thanks, everyone.

P.S. How’s the real world? I submitted Flowers for Algernon for Theatre Rice’s upcoming showcase show, with two current members stepping up to direct and assistant-direct. Unfortunately it didn’t get selected, which isn’t so surprising because the script may not be the best for that group. Meanwhile, I took my Korean midterm, which was easier than expected, saw Lincoln, saw Theatre Rice’s midsemester show, sent “Inkblot” to Vienna Teng (no reply), attempted to organize a potluck that kinda fell through, and stayed up too late working on NaCreSoMo and chatting with friends. My life is pretty okay right now!

This entry was posted on April 01, 2013. Tags: NaCreSoMo 2013