6.6 Reflection - Daily Prompts in Month Six

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we will write a blog post on a different theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the sixth day of the month is "Reflection."

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I have just started the sixth month of this silly blog project where I write about a different theme each day of the month. I can not stress to you enough that these themes were chosen randomly and we didn't do a whole of editing of what words popped out of that random noun generator. Bestest Friend basically gave up after doing the project for two weeks, but I am holding strong. Last week I wrote a little bit about my writing process and Jenny asked if there were any themes I like better than others.  So today I'm going to reflect a little bit on this project and answer that question.

Themes

We have thirty-one themes, but obviously day 31 (Activity) doesn't get used every month (let's not talk about February and that chaos that it caused to my system).

I tend to think of the themes as easy versus hard and ones I enjoy versus ones I don't enjoy as much, so because I'm a social scientist, here's my taxonomy:

Most Fun

	Judgment	Winner	Message	Song	Method	Hat
	Drawing	Decision	Volume		Art
	Library	Location		Contact	Activity
		Meaning
Easier		Reflection	Entertainment	Relationship	Direction	Stranger	Harder
	Atmosphere				Information
	Moment		Instruction			Safety
				Family		Priority
	Complaint			Control	Failure	Depression

Least Fun

So, to answer your specific question, Jenny, I think "Hat" is quite hard, but is also really fun. It's really fun for me to wander around in my life trying to find hats on objects for photos, but I don't always have a good topic to go along with what I find.  I think things like depression and failure are both hard and not particularly fun to write about. A lot of the themes that I labeled easy are easy because I have a set way of writing the posts. 

Judgment: I write a book review
Drawing: If I don't have a drawing from my life, I put a photo of a town landmark through a drawing app on my phone
Library: I just post my library loans and holds
Atmosphere: If all else fails, take a photo of the sky and write about the weather
Moment: I can do a snapshot of the day post

There's a span of days that go Stranger --> Complaint --> Failure--> Control that just feels sort of heavy and negative, so that makes it sort of hard to keep the tone fairly light and that has proven to be a bit of a challenge for me. You might not believe it, but I try to keep things from going to super dark places in this space! I wish they were more spread out through the month. 

But I think that these daily prompts are somewhat helpful in that even the themes that I find more challenging to write about stretch my creativity and force me to think outside of my comfort zone. 

Hannah at the community center. What theme would you put this under?

The Next Six Months

What I'm hoping to do over the next six months is to maintain my consistency in posting and be able to explore different aspects to the themes than the generally literal meaning I've used. I'm also hoping that eventually some of the prompts that are harder for me to write start becoming a bit easier.

I'd also really like to be a bit more proactive in planning my topics. There are so many days when I look at the upcoming topics and I have nothing in my head to write about. I frequently have genius ideas pop into my head when I'm doing things like scrubbing the shower or walking the dog and I just don't take the time to write them down in my notes app on my phone. 

These words have become things I think about all the time and they have started to shape how I live. For instance, since one of the prompts is Art, I purposefully went to an art museum and I go out of my way on walks with Hannah to go by murals and sculptures that dot our town. I am always looking for small complaints to write about and things to celebrate for my winner theme.  I kind of like this, but I hope that these words don't start to limit how I live because I'm too focused on literal random words.

Possible Improvements

I think I might do similar blog projects in the future, but I would definitely make some changes. First, writing daily is exhausting. I think doing it two or three times a week would be sufficient! I also think it would be great if the prompts had been more tailored to my interests, although maybe I wouldn't have been as creative if the prompts were books, Hannah, Zelda, and backyard. Ha!

So that's my reflection on this silly project so far. What do you think of it? Are you up for six more months of hats?