an advent.
Some guy who’s never read anything I’ve written, and probably never will.
On the Instagram Stories recommendation of my old friend Stephanie Wong, PhD, I am currently participating in Anna Brones’s 24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being Advent Calendar. I won’t document every day, but considering I do now have a website where I can record such endeavors, I figured it would be well worth it to capture a couple thoughts and feelings as I go through this delightful creative exercise.
Day 1 brought to mind a seasonal compass, apparently a staple of Brones’s annual project: a sort of intention-setting to return to throughout the month and to use as a guidepost. I, however, have a silly little magpie operating the inside of my brain instead of a thinking human mind, so I immediately literalized this lovely allegorical idea into — what if someone had an actual real compass that told them exactly what to do and where to go, but then, for some reason, they still didn’t do what the compass said? I then, classic monomaniacal me, got obsessed with this idea. I saw a guy on the bus with a haphazard collection of papers that inspired me further because of how strangely they were written, and thus a weird little bus paper-compass lovechild of a short story was born. (And subsequently reborn, because, classic mercurial me, it doesn’t even have the compass in it anymore.)
This isn’t the end of the adventure, though. Yesterday, I had fully prepared myself to put aside the beginnings of this story and embark on the manuscript I’m “supposed” to be working on right now, but then, I looked at day two of Brones’s calendar. In the first three sentences the post mentioned the winter solstice, which had coincidentally already taken a prominent plot position in what I’d written so far of my weird little short story, and expounded on the idea of seasonality, which was a theme I’d begun exploring and then decided to take even further. So Day 2 of the advent calendar became a wonderful moment of creative serendipity, and an opportunity to finish said weird little short story. Now, it seeks a home!
Today is Day 3. I’m writing this blog post to the dulcet sounds of the playlist provided as today’s inspirational offering (thanks, Fog Chaser!), and I’m greatly looking forward to the twenty-one days yet to come.
