[AE.NiNoBilMa] NiNoBilMa: Kindergarten, Week 3 (Colors)
Welcome to week 3 of #NiNoBilMa!
This one's going to be shorter and sweeter because this is the first week I'm not reinventing everything mid-stream. It feels good to say that, and also in the course of writing it out I'm realizing this is literally the third week, which means I have actually reinvented the weekly level of the project exactly once, as the first time I was just inventing it.
This is a sidenote, but: writing out the things that give me anxiety is really useful for figuring out where my brain is making a whole lot of noise about nothing.
Anyway... last week, I had my first finished piece coming out of a prompt, a little bit of flash fiction or vignette, which I have posted online for all to read: If You Should Meet An Okapi Riding A Bicycle. The story linked to at the end of that piece as inspiration was written by my partner, who has taken the approach of trying to write one piece for the general prompt, in contrast to my shotgun approach of starting to write something each day from a different variation on the prompt and seeing if any of them land.
I can definitely see the virtue of his approach in building the creative muscles of "and then keep writing" as a follow-up to "just sit down and start writing", and that's likely to inform how I build on the kindergarten/0th month version of this in 2022.
As a general message to everybody participating: I have never had so many people signing up for my newsletter outside of a launch or similar big push for subscribers as I have since I started tweeting about NiNoBilMa, which suggests to me that there is a lot of interest in it. I find this very gratifying, and I hope that it's
Week 3 Prompts:
1. Animals
2. Colors
Mini Prompts
As as slight change, I'm going to be aiming for three mini-prompts instead of trying to make it daily as I haven't quite hit that target yet. This week, it'll be on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, to best fit in with my schedule. Each mini-prompt will involve an animal and a color. The colors will be a simple, familiar color (like a primary or secondary color), with an optional more specific shade if anyone wants more specific guidance. I'll include a "digital swatch" of the color and shade, and a descriptive definition that can be mined for further inspiration.
I'll be tweeting the animal and the color and then my own "whatever pops into my head" story seed, which I think will be a starting line this time rather than a question, as matching random animals and colors in a question that can start a story is a bit trickier.
But to be clear: if you would rather use the animal and color to come up with your own starting point, or use a different combination entirely, that's fine. The rule is still that there are no rules.
Happy writing!