On January 5th, I wrote this:
I came across a list of challenges, and I can’t now remember where I found it, on a page to do with archaeology I think, but it was a suggestion for thirty days of writing prompts. Over the last couple of years a fellow blogger and writing friend and I have been challenging ourselves to write each one of 73 blog suggestions from a list we came across. We managed the first twenty-five with only a couple of difficulties which were about vlogging and podcasting, neither of which we had any experience of. We looked at the next twenty-five suggestions and they were very dull and repetitive, so we created our own list. I’m about halfway through the next list, but somehow I’ve run out of steam with it – and so has my chum. I will go back to it, meanwhile I need a new challenge – new year, new idea – I will have a go at doing these thirty challenges, one a day for thirty days. I will start next Tuesday, my birthday and see how I get on.
I started this challenge on my birthday, January 12th, with a mixture of optimism and realism – optimistic that I could write about each of the subjects, but realistic enough to know that I am a victim of procrastination, and absentmindedness and I could imagine that a day might slip past and I would forget, or not do it in time, or start and get distracted. I had looked through the list but without any thoughts of what I might do rising to my mind, and so came the day and I had the idea of some new situation, or time in a person’s life, and for some reason thought of when I started at Manchester Poly. I went to Manchester not knowing a single person – and the people who put me up for the first few days I hadn’t met before, relatives of my dad’s colleague. I only have vague memoires of that first day, Sheila and Kath who I mentioned are sketches of people who did become friends, the two striking young women who came in late were also in what became my group, and other more sketchily drawn faces are ones I do remember.
Having written that first post of the thirty, I got into my stride, although there were times when the days ahead until the deadline seemed endless, and glancing at future topics seemed daunting… but somehow I managed, somehow I did it, and I can’t say that any were really difficult, although I admit, I ran dry on ‘Gender’! Most were stories, fourteen of them in fact, seven were in some part autobiographical, and eight were factual or opinion, and one a blend of various!
I have decided to edit them all and publish them as a short book of short stories and biographical pieces. Editing will mean spell-checking, correcting grammatical and other errors, but on the whole leaving them very much as they were when I shared them on my blog.
These are the thirty topics/subjects/titles:
- new
- future
- creativity
- communication
- door
- move
- place
- decolonisation
- circle
- memory
- community
- point
- gender
- hidden
- treasure
- corner
- folklore#Thursday
- discovery
- fashion
- gift
- reinterpret
- red
- identity
- science
- respect
- culture
- storytelling
- friendship
- theory
- protest
