NaNoWriMo came to a successful end for my husband and myself. We each accomplished writing 50,000 words of a novel which now must be re-written and edited. This was the second year for both of us. Much to my surprise it was far easier for me to meet my daily goal this year than last. I don’t know why.

This year I had much less planned going into the first day. No character sketches. No basic outline.  Just a spark of an idea from a writing prompt I used with my 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade writing club students. I am thrilled to have completed what I feel is a quite successful story arc.

But now to the part I am less familiar with. The re-write. I will let it sit until January and then return. Actually, I’m having a hard time leaving my characters alone. But they must wait and keep themselves busy without me for a while.

We are feeling a bit lost, my husband and I.  We don’t want to lose the NaNoWriMo writing momentum we built over the past month. We also don’t want to leave any room for that nasty inner editor to return. We want another project to keep us writing everyday. So we developed a challenge for ourselves.

We each chose some art work – photographs, paintings, sculpture – from the Internet. We wheedled them down to five. We will randomly choose one of those works of art to inspire our writing each week. Every day for a week we will write a poem using that one image. One poem must be a haiku and one must be rhymed and/or metered. The other five can take any form we choose. We will have a date night at the end of each week and read our poems to one another.

If you would like to join us in writing, the first week’s photo is below with a link to where it was found and the artist. The artist is Cade Martin. He is a tremendous photographer and tells a brilliant story with each piece he delivers.

I will be posting all of my poems next week in one post. Come back and see what whimsy has transpired.

Photograph by Cade Martin.