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he dressed me in a
            shrowd of dreams

I drank up all his secrets

and we each left
with insides
    strained and spooky

Prompts for Today: Dream [Inktober] and Spooky [Drawtober]

Yes Sparklers, it's that time of year again—The mini-magnets have come out to play to the tune of 31 days of 31 prompts.

As usual, I've sorta backed myself into a corner on time, but this year my excuse is much simpler that usual—I spent the bulk of today just trying to decide how I wanted to approach this year in the first place.

To make an incredibly long story short: Like last year, I had much grander plans for October this year, but this year I also had a project deadline coming up at the end of September—Or so I thought! I found out on Friday that the deadline we being extended from September 30th to December 31st. That was good news because I was nowhere near having that project ready in time (I probably could've done it if I had to but...it would not have been good for me, let's put it that way), but it was kinda bad news because in my crunch to work on that project, I had to abandon my larger October plans.

Fortunately, I kinda saw abandoning those other plans coming after how topsy-turvy everything went just before Inktober started last year, so about halfway through September I already ordered more supplies so I could use last year's "alcohol ink and not-Yupo paper" methods and had that pretty firmly as my Plan B.

Where my struggle to decide came in was the prompt list. I'm actually pretty happy with this year's official Inktober list, but DeviantArt has also finally decided to get in on the October fun with their own Drawtober list + special badges...And I know I don't have to use their Drawtober list to get the badges, but I'd still like to encourage them to do the same thing again next year, and using their provided list in some way felt like the best way to do that.

[Unfortunately, there appears to be no Obscutober list this year at all, not even a light one like last year's, so that wasn't even an option to consider. ]

You can see that eventually, after comparing both lists to make sure I didn't see any major conflicts I felt like I just couldn't work with, I decided I wanted to try using both lists at the same time.

And eagle-eyed Sparklers may notice I have also "broken" my one cardinal rule of Inktobers' past: This year, instead of forbidding myself to use the actual prompt words, I've changed the goal to try and include them both!

I'm prepared to be very wrong, but I thought that since I'm using two lists at once, that might actually be easier than trying to avoid using the words. [For Obscutober, where the words were obscure to begin with, it was easy. But I've definitely had issues with trying to avoid the Inktober words before.]

Relatedly, in the past when I've tried to avoid the Inktober words, that also included variations of them like "running" or "ran" for "run." Originally, I wanted to keep that rule—I could only use the prompts as-written—but I wrote "dreams" into this poem before fully making that decision and didn't like how the sound of the poem changed when I tried to rework that line to only use "dream."

So I am allowing variations as well, but only if necessary—The goal will still be to use the prompts as-written as much as possible. I may end up restricting it to "only one prompt word can be a variation at a time" or something like that too, but that's a decision for tomorrow because I feel like I've made enough today. [At least in relation to Inktober.]

And also: I think I did this a few times out of necessity last year, but this year I'm formally introducing bullet-point lists for various things about each poem I want to explain, instead of requiring myself to string those things into coherent paragraphs. Hopefully, this will make writing the descriptions at all a little easier on me, especially when I'm really pushing my timetable limits. [Which loyal Sparklers will know I tend to do a lot in October...]

I went with a purple-y background simply because I personally associate blues/pinks/purples with the concept of dreams. I don't really know how that happened, but I do think Inktobers' past are partially to blame. But I also included black because...well, that's a fairly obvious choice for "spooky," isn't it?

However, I didn't want to lean too heavily on black because it has always bugged me that last year's first 3 days used so much black, to the point that I avoided it for most of the rest of the month. I'd like to avoid both of those problems this year. Especially because black ink is usually difficult for me to photograph properly.

I originally had a different line instead of "I drank up all his secrets," but after thinking about it, I see that unmentioned line working very well for Day 17, so I opted to save it until then and use something else here.

"Strained" and "spooky" were originally flipped, but while I was trying to rework "dreams" into "dream," a few tweaks for that last line came to mind too...I didn't go with any of the whole-word changes, but once I tried ending on "spooky" I couldn't let it go, so that change stayed.

Color me surprised that I have "drink," "drunk," and "drunkard," mini-magnets, but no "drank."

That about covers everything I wanted to mention, I think. If there's something I missed, I can either come back and add it later or touch on it in October's Monthly Museletter. [...Which yes, I do still intend on doing those even though it's been a while. August and September ended up being more busy/hectic months than I thought, so they got pushed by the wayside. ]

So now then if you Sparklers will excuse me I have some cross-posting to do, and then I will probably procrastinate on tomorrow's Ink/Drawtober by working on just about anything else creative that strikes my fancy. Because would I even be MysticSparkleWings if I did anything different?

Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings
Inspired by FridgePoetProject

Where to find me & my artwork:
My Website | My Book | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram |  Other Fun Links

Description
My Website | My Book | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi (Now with Membership Tiers for as little as $1 a Month!) | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |  Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram |  Other Fun Links

he dressed me in a
            shrowd of dreams

I drank up all his secrets

and we each left
with insides
    strained and spooky

Prompts for Today: Dream [Inktober] and Spooky [Drawtober]

Yes Sparklers, it's that time of year again—The mini-magnets have come out to play to the tune of 31 days of 31 prompts.

As usual, I've sorta backed myself into a corner on time, but this year my excuse is much simpler that usual—I spent the bulk of today just trying to decide how I wanted to approach this year in the first place.

To make an incredibly long story short: Like last year, I had much grander plans for October this year, but this year I also had a project deadline coming up at the end of September—Or so I thought! I found out on Friday that the deadline we being extended from September 30th to December 31st. That was good news because I was nowhere near having that project ready in time (I probably could've done it if I had to but...it would not have been good for me, let's put it that way), but it was kinda bad news because in my crunch to work on that project, I had to abandon my larger October plans.

Fortunately, I kinda saw abandoning those other plans coming after how topsy-turvy everything went just before Inktober started last year, so about halfway through September I already ordered more supplies so I could use last year's "alcohol ink and not-Yupo paper" methods and had that pretty firmly as my Plan B.

Where my struggle to decide came in was the prompt list. I'm actually pretty happy with this year's official Inktober list, but DeviantArt has also finally decided to get in on the October fun with their own Drawtober list + special badges...And I know I don't have to use their Drawtober list to get the badges, but I'd still like to encourage them to do the same thing again next year, and using their provided list in some way felt like the best way to do that.

[Unfortunately, there appears to be no Obscutober list this year at all, not even a light one like last year's, so that wasn't even an option to consider. ]

You can see that eventually, after comparing both lists to make sure I didn't see any major conflicts I felt like I just couldn't work with, I decided I wanted to try using both lists at the same time.

And eagle-eyed Sparklers may notice I have also "broken" my one cardinal rule of Inktobers' past: This year, instead of forbidding myself to use the actual prompt words, I've changed the goal to try and include them both!

I'm prepared to be very wrong, but I thought that since I'm using two lists at once, that might actually be easier than trying to avoid using the words. [For Obscutober, where the words were obscure to begin with, it was easy. But I've definitely had issues with trying to avoid the Inktober words before.]

Relatedly, in the past when I've tried to avoid the Inktober words, that also included variations of them like "running" or "ran" for "run." Originally, I wanted to keep that rule—I could only use the prompts as-written—but I wrote "dreams" into this poem before fully making that decision and didn't like how the sound of the poem changed when I tried to rework that line to only use "dream."

So I am allowing variations as well, but only if necessary—The goal will still be to use the prompts as-written as much as possible. I may end up restricting it to "only one prompt word can be a variation at a time" or something like that too, but that's a decision for tomorrow because I feel like I've made enough today. [At least in relation to Inktober.]

And also: I think I did this a few times out of necessity last year, but this year I'm formally introducing bullet-point lists for various things about each poem I want to explain, instead of requiring myself to string those things into coherent paragraphs. Hopefully, this will make writing the descriptions at all a little easier on me, especially when I'm really pushing my timetable limits. [Which loyal Sparklers will know I tend to do a lot in October...]

I went with a purple-y background simply because I personally associate blues/pinks/purples with the concept of dreams. I don't really know how that happened, but I do think Inktobers' past are partially to blame. But I also included black because...well, that's a fairly obvious choice for "spooky," isn't it?

However, I didn't want to lean too heavily on black because it has always bugged me that last year's first 3 days used so much black, to the point that I avoided it for most of the rest of the month. I'd like to avoid both of those problems this year. Especially because black ink is usually difficult for me to photograph properly.

I originally had a different line instead of "I drank up all his secrets," but after thinking about it, I see that unmentioned line working very well for Day 17, so I opted to save it until then and use something else here.

"Strained" and "spooky" were originally flipped, but while I was trying to rework "dreams" into "dream," a few tweaks for that last line came to mind too...I didn't go with any of the whole-word changes, but once I tried ending on "spooky" I couldn't let it go, so that change stayed.

Color me surprised that I have "drink," "drunk," and "drunkard," mini-magnets, but no "drank."

That about covers everything I wanted to mention, I think. If there's something I missed, I can either come back and add it later or touch on it in October's Monthly Museletter. [...Which yes, I do still intend on doing those even though it's been a while. August and September ended up being more busy/hectic months than I thought, so they got pushed by the wayside. ]

So now then if you Sparklers will excuse me I have some cross-posting to do, and then I will probably procrastinate on tomorrow's Ink/Drawtober by working on just about anything else creative that strikes my fancy. Because would I even be MysticSparkleWings if I did anything different?

Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings
Inspired by FridgePoetProject

Where to find me & my artwork:
My Website | My Book | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram |  Other Fun Links