Thread by @AlexandraErin

Heard from a couple of people that the first two #NiNoBilMa prompts are too open-ended for them to be able to just sit down and start writing without prep.

I'm sorry about that. I have definitely had similar experiences.

This idea came to me near the end of November and I had planned on spending two weeks developing it further before launching in December, but... I had a pretty rough time, and even giving myself most of another week by basing it around Mondays didn't help much.

And I also did not put together the fact that the first Monday in December is a day of traditional importance for my family, as it's not one I grew up with but cohabited into, so I didn't have as much time during the day to put into the project as I might otherwise have.

It might have been wise to revise the schedule, especially since nothing is set in stone, but I made the decision as soon as I realized I was launching something in December that I was going to keep culturo-religious stuff out of it. No holiday theming or cancellations.

This is a good question, and I think I see what you're getting at, and I agree. But the thing is, it doesn't matter what my goal is if the prompts don't help someone accomplish it.

And no, I don't think I can make exercises that work for everybody...

https://twitter.com/yrbroshane/status/1468248940789305352

...and yes, I have also heard from people who like the prompts.

Anyway! I got hung up a bit here on the explanation (and sidetracked because six other things are happening), but where I was going is: help is on the way.

It was my intention to immediately pair the two open-ended prompts with more detailed instructions one might follow or adapt for how one might go about "writing anything" about them.

When I realized my schedule wasn't going to allow for that this week, I decided instead that I would send out the prompts on Monday as a big blank canvas and then supplement them with some exercises that are more paint-by-numbers throughout the weeks.

This whole thing is an experiment I've jumped into with very little planning, and I had considered dropping the "Kindergarten" level in order to give myself more time to do it in an orderly fashion, especially since that would make it divide evenly into 12 months.

But in the end, I decided trying to plan out exercises when I have no idea how they'd go would be less useful than having a very low-stakes introductory month when I could know for sure that almost nobody is paying attention, and those who are, are invested enough for feedback.

And I am learning useful things about how this needs to work! In my own test sessions from before the weekend, I found my initial idea of how to handle December was flawed: I had planned on doing one prompt a week, going from very simple and abstract to complex and concrete.

Specifically, I was going to start with shapes as the first prompt and end with animals.

In retrospect, I'm not sure what my thinking was, in believing that simpler == easier, but. In practice, for me, it was not.

I'm not saying it's impossible for me to be given a random geometric shape and then start writing something about or inspired by it. I'm just saying it takes more thinking than doing that for a random animal.

But rather than assuming I had the whole simplicity/abstraction vs. difficulty thing backwards on a universal level, I decided that was a red herring and came up with four weeks of two prompts, one of which is something concrete-ish and one of which is abstract-ish.

...this thread is taking a lot more time to get through because my internet connection is being really spotty today, so I'll just leave it at that. More detailed (and still optional) instructions and prompts are coming, is the point.