The first time I came across a “Thing A Day” yearlong project was when my friend Marcus Fischer did it on his Dust Breeding site. (This Substack is new, but has some of that original Thing A Day series archived.) I don’t know if he thought up the concept, but his was the first I was aware of. It is a relatively common practice now, with books and gurus and stuff. 

Personally I don’t care about any of that, but I do like rule-based creation methods and intentional limitations as a form of creative go-juice. It doesn’t work for everyone, and many people I know find the entire concept stressful and counterproductive. Speaking strictly for myself, I find these sorts of challenges to be refreshing and inspiriational. I’ve attempted this before (witness my Instagram starting on Jan 1, 2020. It was going along pretty good for about 45 days, but, well, you all had the same 2020 I did, so you know. )

One thing I learned was that it is very difficult to do this sort of project if the scope is too narrow. My last thing-a-day, I limited it to disembodied-hands performance videos of ambient music. That is a remarkably small window to create in, and it got tedious and annoying fairly quickly. Lesson learned, and for this go-round, my only rule is that there must be a visual record, and there must be intent. That is to say that there should be at least a picture I meant to take, a shot I set up. That’s the bare minimum. I have a lot of interests outside music, including abstract art, photography, fine woodworking, metalwork, hiking, &c. and I will exercise most of them in this project. 

So, thank you for following, and please don’t hesitate to comment/question.