The October Game

In this past Sunday's Johnson City Press was an article about a man named Bill Counts and his "October Game." Counts is a painter with a day job, and the past few Octobers he has played this game: he paints a picture every day of the month and puts it on his website (http://www.billcounts.com/), along with a caption about the picture's creation, which caption might also stray into musings on art, culture and so on. The paintings are created each day in anywhere from 30 minutes to four hours, depending on how much time he has that day. Most of them, he says, are awful, but be that as it may, each painting must be put up on the Internet for all to see (for better or worse).

Because I think this is an interesting idea, I'm going to try something similar. Instead of paintings, however, I'm going to try and write a poem or some short prose piece and post it every day of October. This seems to me like something I won't be able to do, but I'm going to give it a whirl anyway. Counts apparently paints October scenes such as leaves, pumpkins and black cats, so I intend to do the same with my writing. I might write about the October leaves or the October moon, about Columbus Day, about Halloween, about something that happened that October day. We'll see.

When I was a songwriter, October was always an inspiring month, a time for reflection, and many of my favorite songs were written during that time. The month has certainly remained for me a time of deep reflection, but, again, we'll see if it remains a time of inspiration.

My rules: 1) write something complete every day, trying to keep the writing more or less related to October and autumn; 2) try to provide some short description of each piece of writing; 3) post this to the blog by midnight each calendar day.

I begin tomorrow!