Quicunque

Every so often, especially at this restless time of year, I get the nagging urge to discover and nurture a new interest or start a new creative hobby. And so I whine to everyone who will listen to me for ideas and they suggest all kinds of improbable, unlikely and illegal activities. So far this year friends have volunteered themselves, their other halves, or 'this person I know' to teach me to carve spoons, knit, weave willow baskets and rebuild a vintage Triumph motorbike. I have been encouraged to keep a mixed media nature journal and attend salsa classes, and invited to join a shamanic drumming circle (I'm quite tempted by that, actually. If only it didn't mean getting up at some inhumane hour to drum in the dawn at solstices...).

Will I do any of these things? It varies from not very likely to you-must-be-fucking-jesting. I rather fear I'm better at mulling over possible new hobbies rather than stirring my lazy arse into actually doing them.

Last year I joined the April Fools writing project and wrote 5000 words during the month- at least a couple of thousand words more than I might probably have achieved if I hadn't had a tangible target to aim for. In fact I started off with a target of 3000 words for the month, but ended up achieving that early enough to move the goalposts.

So I'm going to do it again this year and have already signed up for it. I'm stayed with the modest goal of 5000 words since I am as usual over-committed and under-motivated, and am totally out of the habit of writing on a regular basis.

Progress will be monitored and the reward for myself at the end will be a entire bar of Montezuma's Sea Dog¹ chocolate all to myself.

0 / 5,000 (0.0%)

¹ Dark Chocolate with Lime & Sea Salt. To die for.

Since I have never gone by my birth-name online (and almost certainly never will), over the years I've been known by various names in the collaborative writing communities and associated places where I've hung out. Many of those names were specific to a particular time and place and although I'll still answer to them (because nostalgia is my middle name) I grew out of them, or grew out of the person I was when I wore them.

Viridian Green was a name I chose for myself some 4 or 5 years ago as a baggage-free alternative to the pseudonymn I was best known by at the communities I was frequenting at that time - a tight and rather incestuous world whose appeal was starting to sour for me. I've switched to using it a lot more over the last year since it's become a name I feel comfortable with, a cross between a Craft name and a nom de plume/guerre.

At the time I first adopted Viridian Green as my pseudonym, I wasn't aware it was also the name of a design movement based on a bright green environmentalism philosophy*. Without even knowing they existed, I'd even unwittingly chosen the name for the same reason the Viridian movement chose it. Green is suggestive of nature and environmentalism, and yet viridian looks cold and not entirely natural. It's the colour of futurism and technology as much as it is of nature. It's the colour of sea serpents and cats' eyes, it's deep water beneath overhanging leaves along a river bank and C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.

The Viridian Design Movement closed in 2008, but I am still here embracing my own personal manifesto.