Monday, December 20, 2010

A river of stones

The observant amongst you might have noticed the new badge to the right announcing that I'm going to be taking part in a river of stones in January 2011.

What is a river of stones? Well, it's all about being observant. An international writing project, set up by Fiona Robyn and her fiance Kaspa, participants will every day in January write/blog a small fragment, or 'stone', describing in detail something in the world around them. For more details of how to become involved see the dedicated blog here.

I'm quite excited about doing this. My writing has been getting stale and I need a new motivator. Description is never the strongest part of my work, so to spend a few moments each day just concentrating on getting what I see down in words will be a worthwhile writing exercise. The concept takes me right back to the daily haiku at the start of the Open University A215 Creative Writing course and the excitement of the Your Messages project, which was my stepping stone to publication.

I'll be posting my 'small stones' here, starting on 1st January and will be using the post tag 'aros', as Kaspa has created a lovely widget which apparently collects all the stones under that tag. No, I don't know how it works either!

A river of stones can also be found on Twitter at @ariverofstones and under the hashtag #aros

8 comments:

Unknown said...

Lovely to have you with us! I was going to share this on Facebook but you haven't enabled the little thingummies underneath - although I just looked and I can't find out how I got mine! Anyway - look forward to the 1st...

Anonymous said...

Sounds great, Cathy.

CJ xx

Cathy said...

Fiona, I don't have links because I am a technonumpty and anyway I rarely link to my blog on FB, for reasons too complex to explain. But feel to share a link to this post if you wish. I'm very much looking forward to starting.

CJ - why don't you join us? x

Miriam said...

Thanks for posting this, Cathy. Reading about it for the second time made me decide to join, too.

I hope I can stick to it for a month!

Cathy said...

Oh I'm so glad you're doing it too Miriam. I think we will find that writing a daily small stone becomes second nature for the month. I hope so, anyway. x

Jen said...

Ooh, this sounds a great project - not least because I have Fiona's 'Small Stones' book ready to take on my Christmas jaunt - perfect synchronicity.

I'm definitely going to do it - a lovely new project fr my shiny new blog, hurrah!

Casdok said...

I think you will be brillient at this - being a mother of your boys im sure you are very observant!

Cathy said...

Yay Jen!

Casdok, I'm not sure that I am really...I've always spent so much time concentrating on what they were doing that I haven't really had time to stop and notice the world around me.