Notevember and on

TL;DR: I wrote 23 things (songs, poems, stories) inspired by tiny art. Will upload every day from May 1 through May 23, 2020. First one here. Full origin story below.

Have you heard about Inktober? Every year, artists from around the world draw one new thing every day in October. They all work from the same prompts.

Last year, one of my housemates – game developer Ott Madis Ozolit – decided to doodle in his tiny notebook for Inktober. The drawings inspired me to do the same – except I would write instead of draw. Taking his Inktober doodles as my prompts, I was going to do “Notevember”.

But life intervened, as it is wont to do. Notevember turned into Deadlinecember, which faded into Canuhurry, into FebuGETITFUCKINGDONE! By early April, I had finally finished a collection of 23 short stories, poems and songs. Yes, 23 instead of 31, because life had intervened with Ott’s efforts as well. He (and the rest of Placeholder Gameworks) were crunching to finish their game Death and Taxes, which cut short Ott’s spare time for tiny doodles on October 22.

In any case, I started performing my Notevember bits as weekly poetry readings, storytelling sessions and live music at Spelkollektivet, where I live and work. Now they are going online, one at a time, every day in May until they run out.

Much like Ott’s notebook drawings, the Notevember entries are rough and unpolished, but stories all the same. From start to finish, each one took between 30 minutes and 5 hours to create. They will be accompanied by the original art that inspired them.

The first entry is a short story called The Stone Circle, which you can read here.

If you want to check out Ott’s other, actually polished work, he can be found on Instagram and Twitter.