I made a Thing!

This is thirty of them.  Thirty things.

I can be kind of a Joiner(tm).

I see all these cool projects and think ohmahgerd, I want to play along, forgetting that joining things takes time that I often don't have.  And, y'know, the kind of brain that sees things all the way through, whereas mine kind of loses interest part way in and meanders off after a pretty butterfly about two days later.

Enter the #100 Day Project.

The concept's simple: pick a thing and make/do that thing for the next 100 days.  It can be literally anything, and you can document it online (mostly instagram) or just do it.  Either way.  No real rules.

And, because my brain is my brain, I immediately came up with something like thirty different things I wanted to try doing.  Because I am Superwoman, who can bend time to her will and shoehorn ten hours' worth of activities into an hour's worth of free time.  Clearly.

Eventually, after going twelve rounds with my list of potentials, I settled on two.

One is this:

I'm sending a postcard a day to people who have influenced me, inspired me, or who might want or need a little extra love.

The way I see it, the world needs more of these random little shows of kindness and gratitude.  Sorta counters all the negative crap we get shovelled on our heads in great quantity every day.

Oddly enough, I'm on day 19 of this thing, and haven't missed a day.  Not even when my face exploded and I had to have an emergency root canal, where they ended up having to put a titanium screw in my face.  Not even kidding.  But I figure that if I can make a postcard on days where my face is trying to kill me and/or I'm being partially converted into a cyborg, I should be able to keep it going on "normal" days.  So there's that.

Then, there's this:

My hyperflexed toes say hello.

One hundred one-page zines.

Because I'm not entirely insane, I'm not actually doing this one every day, though, most of the time, it's been every day.  I'm just aiming for quantity with this.  One hundred one page zines.  If that takes a hundred days or two hundred days, so be it.  The goal sits at 100 one pagers.

I've finished week one (how I'm breaking this project up), and week two starts today.  (Took about a week off for the explodeyface thing, mentioned above.  I'm not superhuman, after all.)

That photo at the top?  That's thirty copies of seven days' worth of 8-page zines.  Wrapped in a strip of paper from an old book that finally fell apart.  Full of widely-varying rambles while I'm getting my footing with it, ranging from what I wanted to be when I grew up to kale chip recipes and a drawing of a local animal that groups up in a giant sex ball to mate with a dozen or so other lizards.  (The things one learns when one is researching local fauna...)

I initially only made ten copies of them, thinking it would be one for me, one for my mom (who, btw, would be horrified by the lizard sex ball thing), and eight to sit in a drawer until some intrepid soul bought one or two off etsy.  But all ten sold out in literally minutes, and I made this thirty, up there at the top.

They're almost all sold out, too.  (I think I have one left at this point.)

I may need to rethink my print run sizes, going forward.  (It's all a learning curve at this point.)

Overall, this Joining Thing(tm) has been a good thing so far, this go-'round.

I like the challenge, and I really like getting my hands back into all the Making Of The Things that are physical, tangible.  I really missed publishing things and playing with layout and such.

The group start for #the100dayproject has passed (obviously), but you can join at any time.  It officially ends on July 11th, but a bunch of folks have said they took a year to do their own hundred days of (whatever).  So if you're interested, or the thought of it inspires you, do it.  Even if you don't make it the whole hundred days, you'll have created things you wouldn't have normally created, which is fantastic.

(Plus, people who start projects and don't finish them are still infinitely cooler than people who sit around wishing they'd start something and never do.  I'm just saying.)