Do you remember last February 29, when I decided to get back into creative writing by writing something each week for a year, inspired by souvenir playing cards and letters of the alphabet? Probably not; I didn’t publicise it much. But it worked; I did, in fact, get back into writing, and although some of the things were hurried and disastrous and a lot of them were not very good, a lot of them were passable and some were very good. One was published in Offshoots and another in a Valentine’s Day chapbook. I’ve made videos of a few of the shorter ones I liked. Some were such surprising ideas that I’d never have thought of them without the playing card prompts, and would never have done anything with those thoughts without the deadline. In most cases, I’m glad I did. I also unexpectedly ended up with a MIDI keyboard, a hastily-coded program that will make rhyming parody ‘lyrics’ given a rhyme scheme, syllable counts, and a list of words, and a hastily-coded add-on to that which would get my Mac to sing. All in all, it was a huge success.

Anyway, my writing side has lain fallow for nearly three years. I’ve accumulated more playing cards, and more ideas. This weekend is another Geneva Writer’s Conference, and another February 29th is coming up. So I’m going to do it again. I’ll start by posting a ‘joker’ on February 29th, and then do a playing card each weekend, perhaps skipping the weekend immediately after the joker. I will make the deadline Sunday noon rather than midnight this time, so I don’t end up tired at work on Monday morning, and I have Sunday afternoon free. I also won’t limit myself to writing; if I happen to be able to finish a video or some software or an interesting diagram one week, I’ll publish that instead. This will probably happen less often, since these things take longer to do, but I’ll leave it as an option.

I have an idea for something to write about other than playing cards, so I’m not certain the cards will always be relevant. Perhaps I’ll do the other thing on the side, or perhaps I’ll use the cards and letters as additional inspiration, or a way of selecting which part of the other idea to tackle on a given week.

The post on the 29th will be a Joker Game like the two I did during the last series, involving sticking together 52 unrelated sentences into a coherent story. It will be not long after I get back from the second JoCo Cruise Crazy, so I’m going to have to think about it a bit while I’m on board. Luckily, I’ve come up with a way to carry the sentences around with me. I already have the sentences, so there’s no need to tweet any at me.