Tag: project

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Leaving Hotchpotch After Nine Years

Persons! I had a technical failure yesterday, the like of which I haven’t seen in a long time. This meant I couldn’t bring you a full entry.

I was at my weekly Tuesday writing group as usual. The Internet can be dodgy there, but it normally connects after a few tries and/or a reboot. This time, my laptop was having none of it, so I tapped out a short entry on the Jetpack app briefly explaining the situation.

However, it’s another literary group I want to talk about today. Long-term readers will know about Hotchpotch, which is a monthly open-mic primarily aimed at writers, where members can sign up for five-minute slots. I didn’t set up the group, but when I took over in 2015, it had already existed for five years.

One week ago, at the last meeting, I announced my intention to step down from running it after nine years and pass it on to Eilidh, who’s been assisting for well over a year. We’ve taken a couple of months to discuss how we would make the transition, and that process will continue into our next event in October.

The reason I chose this time is not because Hotchpotch is in a bad way. It’s arguably the most streamlined and consistent it’s ever been, and it’s precisely because it’s so strong that I feel able to step back from it in favour of new projects.

Indeed, that very Sunday, I took part in a one-off show as part of the Dundee Fringe, and in next week’s entry, I’ll cover how that went.

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New Notebooks and Diaries

This festive season, a lot of writers will be given gifts of brand-new notebooks. It’s a safe bet that most writers will appreciate the thought, plus they’re relatively inexpensive for all but the fanciest designs.

Indeed, some writers find they can more easily start a new project with a fresh book, even if – paradoxically – nobody wants to spoil the new pages with ink.

I’m someone who doesn’t don’t fall into that camp. I do write by hand much of the time, but I can reach into my cupboard and pick up at least one that still has a number of usable blank pages. I also don’t have the storage space for too many new books. As such, buying new is a rarity for me.

There is one exception to this. Every year, I buy a specific type of diary, usually a Moleskine or a Leuchtturm 1917. These have a diary week on each left-hand page, while the right side is feint-ruled, allowing for notes to be taken.

I began this approach after reading The Books of Albion, a collection of diaries by the musician Peter Doherty. His diaries often document what happened during a particular week or contain fragments of song lyrics or poems. Some pages also act as a scrapbook, with photographs and tickets glued in.

While my diaries don’t have this level of detail, it’s interesting to read what I’ve written some years before. Often I’ll find a draft of something that was never developed into a final piece, or occasionally an early draft of a now-finished work.

So until I really do run out of space, buying new notebooks will remain a once-yearly occurrence.

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Time and Motion

I’ve recently been placing a lot of effort into my Fun a Day project, which I talked about last month. It’s now been dubbed Junkuary, as it makes use of recycled materials.

This means that my writing has taken a back seat as I’ve made an effort to step away from using words and focus on visual art. However, this is only temporary, and I’ll go back to writing shortly.

Head over to my Instagram page to see what’s happening, and I’ll catch you here next week for more talk of prose and poetry.

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Ready, Get Set, Stop

On this blog, I’ve been talking about Fun a Day Dundee, a project where artists and other creative sorts are encouraged to work on ‘something fun’ during January. For those who make a living from their art, this is traditionally a slow month after the chaos of Christmas.

For my previous two FADD projects, I’ve taken the opportunity to undertake writing projects. I’ve happily updated my Instagram page each day showing draft work, with a view to improving it at a later stage.

I’m at a point with writing where I don’t mind showing people half-done work. But I plan to use FADD to step away from writing and attempt something new, and I don’t want to reveal my pieces before I’m ready.

Nonetheless, there’s no requirement to show works in progress, and I will keep Instagram updated with something relevant to the project each day.

I also have a handwritten diary to log my process and progress, so when I’m ready to show my work, the details will be there.

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Looking Ahead to January

Although it’s not until next year, I’m already gearing up to take part in Fun a Day Dundee (FADD) for the third time. This is the local chapter of a global project that encourages participants to undertake something creative during the month of January. It happens at a time of year when professional artists and creators often struggle after the Christmas rush.

I first learnt of FADD in 2017, although the group has been running since 2011. A few of my artist friends were taking part, some working on a different piece every day for the 31 days, others concentrating on one or more larger projects during this time.

Those friends told me I should take part the following year, but I had some reservations: I’m not a painter, a model-maker, a jeweller, nor anything similar. Rather, my craft is writing words in pencil or pen on lined paper.

Rationally, I knew I was welcome, while still feeling like a misfit. As such, I hesitated in signing up, only registering my interest on the first day: 1 January 2018.

I started off with the intention of producing one piece of prose or poetry each day of the month, with provision to create side projects if something else occurred to me that I wanted to try out. Four days into FADD, I created my first such side project and something extraordinary happened.

In late December, I’d ordered a watch strap from Amazon, and it arrived in early January with six wasteful feet of brown paper cushioning stuffed into a needlessly large box. But inspired by the artists of FADD posting their work on Instagram and Twitter, I straightened out the paper and kept it aside for the public exhibition. I then planned to invite visitors to write down their own stories of corporate waste on that sheet of paper.

With the addition of that piece and my other side projects, the exhibition display looked so much more colourful and engaging than simply a folder full of black or blue ink on cream paper, and visitors did indeed fill the paper with anecdotes.

But more than that, this piece in particular gave me a direction for my 2019 project, where I still wrote words, but on recycled material. The surfaces used included used envelopes, expired tickets, and even the sole of a worn-out Dr Marten boot; anything except fresh lined paper.

In 2020, I have every intention of taking the recycling theme one stage further. The finer details will be worked out nearer the time, but the project will include actively destroying some of what I wrote in 2018 and 2019, and encouraging the public to do the same.

Whatever happens, however, I will make sure I have fun doing it, just as the name suggests.

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Almost Nearly Started and Just About Finished

There are times when it’s difficult to begin a new project or to add to an existing one. This entry is due to be published at 6pm on Tuesday 7 May, but I only wrote the first words at around 8:30pm the day before.

Rationally, I know I need to put something out by the deadline, but it was a struggle to think of a topic, plus I have another project I’m keen to start once this entry is written that doesn’t have a time pressure associated with it.

Fortunately, I have the luxury of addressing this procrastination within my final entry, thus creating a topic to discuss.

And it’s not only writing projects. I promised a friend I’d read her Star Wars fan fiction, but that’s been 13 months and I still haven’t touched a word of it.

As I write, I’ve looked up the link again and charged up my Kobo. At least if I transfer it to my device, I have a higher chance of looking at it before 2020. I can’t provide a link because I was sworn not to share it.

Another area where I’m trying to keep up to date is podcasts. There’s a local one called Creative Chit-Chat that I only began to listen to at episode 46 because I knew the interviewee. I’ve then made a concerted effort to go back and listen to them all in order; I currently have episode 35 queued up.

One aspect I love about catching up with a production is that it can compress a long period of time into a shorter period so you can see the changes that have occurred since then.

A prime example is The West Wing, where the fictional political landscape changed over its eight years on the air, influenced by what was happening in the news at the same time.

No doubt if I scrolled back through my entries on this blog, I would find a comparable pattern emerging. Heck, maybe one of my regular readers has already done this and can comment on what they found.

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The Project That Turns into Another

In April, the first of two Camp NaNoWriMo events takes place. This is a less involved version of the main National Novel Writing Month in November, where members can choose their own word count or even a different type of literary project.

My aim was to produce another draft of the novel I’d redrafted in November, spending a target average of one hour per day. However, I haven’t done any of this editing so far because my time has been taken up organising three live events over the next month. There will be more about those in the next entry.

In fact, the entry you’ll see next week has already been partially written, and that’s because I put aside that for a piece that came to me yesterday, prompted by a sign on a coffee machine that read ‘Biscuits don’t live here’.

It certainly isn’t the first occasion where I’ve felt inclined to put one project aside in favour of another. Depending on the time constraints, I usually choose the one that’s eating away at me the most.

In the case of the biscuits poem, I probably would never have completed this if I’d left it aside to write the original blog entry. By contrast, I know I’ll come back to that entry next week because this space needs to be filled.

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All the Fun of the Day

For the second year, I’ll be taking part in Fun a Day. This is a project where participants do something creative during January, either one project per day or something larger over the entire month.

I’ve already started to document my progress in a commonplace book. With the official hashtag now announced, I posted my first two pictures online. The first contained the three rules of my project. The second contained this quote from Monica Geller in Friends.

Rules are good! Rules help control the fun!
Rules are good! Rules help control the fun!

My main project will be text-based. I’ll be writing a fragment of 40 words on Day 1, 39 words on Day 2, and so on until I’m writing 10 words on Day 31. The text will form a complete circle so the fragment on the last day will join up with the fragment on the first.

That said, being around visual artists has had an effect on me. Last year’s project consisted largely of pen on lined paper, which looked somewhat out of place compared to the other participants’ installations. Poets think about how their work looks on the page; artists think about how it looks on the wall.

In fact, the proposed title is Line for a Walk, derived from a quote by the artist Paul Klee. Depending upon which source you read, he said, ‘A line is simply a dot going for a walk,’ or ‘A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.’ I actually used this analogy to explain to the organiser what it’s like to write a novel in a month, and the phrase stuck with me.

There are side projects planned alongside the main one, but these aren’t quite so rigorously defined yet. Even if they don’t happen, January will not be a dull month.