This could turn out to be a ridiculous undertaking

There are all sorts of crazy ideas floating around the internet. Most I wouldn’t touch with a barge pole (and there are possibly many more I try to avoid even knowing about!). One of the more interesting ones, however, is a drawing challenge, in which 100 themes are provided and you’re supposed to come up with a drawing for each. I wouldn’t mind trying this one day, but not right now*. My artistic efforts are usually quite slow, and I don’t have time to indulge in drawing just at the moment. Nevertheless, my opportunities for doing creative things seems to have diminished somewhat, and a challenge like this could impose discipline/provide an incentive to try to incorporate a little more creativity in my life.

So, since I don’t think the drawing idea is feasible (for now), I’m hoping that I might be fast enough at writing poetry to use words as my medium (although since the first one took longer than I expected, I may be in trouble). My self-imposed rule is a maximum of 100 words or so for each poem (so no epic ballads, I’m afraid), and my plan is to do one a day, for the next 100 days. In the interests of not having a totally preposterous plan (oh, yes?!), I have given myself a head start: I have already started and have twelve days/poems up my sleeve because I know that life can get in the way of ridiculous challenges and I am going to be realistic about this and prepare for it. The poems may undergo a little editing in the days between being written and being posted on this blog, but, based on what I have done so far, they’ll be a little rough around the edges (and probably on the insides as well). I am going to try not to skip themes; I just have to deal with whatever comes up next on the list, although I might read a little ahead to give my subconscious a heads-up. I’m not going to give you the whole list in advance, but the first five themes are:

1. Introduction
2. Love
3. Light
4. Dark
5. Seeking solace

That’s the plan. As I said, this could turn out to be a ridiculous undertaking. Normal blog entries will continue when the mood and schedule takes me (whatever “normal” is (!), though you may have noticed that my post-rate has declined a bit in recent months), but for the next little while this is also on the agenda. It starts tomorrow.

* Although the idea dates back to at least 2008 (as far as I can tell) I came across the idea from Lee, who drew Londo Mollari with a mo for me a couple of years ago. He is currently doing the 100 themes as a one-a-day (on average) challenge in his deceptively simple style, using pop-culture movie references — and some other things — as his inspiration.

[Update: I finished the challenge just before the middle of August. An epilogue post on August 13 lists all the poems, categorised by quality or poem and level of seriousness/comedy (my judgements; your mileage may vary)]