It’s March 18, 2020, and like much of the rest of the world, the Inouye family is sheltering in place, trying to avoid in-person social contact with the rest of the world. We are fortunate to have our health for the moment, so the big question we have in front of us is: what are we going to do stuck inside the house for the next few months?
We’ll enjoy hiking, watching television and movies and playing games together, and generally spending time together as a family. This unexpected change in our schedule seems like an opportunity to do something more, however.
Some years ago, I became a fan of Jonathan Coulton. He became famous by creating a number of songs that went viral in an earlier era of the internet when blogs and forums ruled the web. Many of his earliest hits were the product of an experiment he called Thing a Week, in which he forced himself to write, produce, and release a new song every week.
I’ve always been an admirer of the Thing a Week concept and related ideas — I’ve signed up for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) several times, but November is a terrible month to try to do anything time intensive with my work and family schedule. I’ve never successfully committed to anything like it before.
Until now. My daily commute, which used to take two hours, now takes ten seconds (the walk from my bedroom to my home office), so in theory I have some time. And as luck would have it, so do the other five members of the family. If we each pick a day of the week, we can create something, share it on that day, and have content six days of the week. What about the seventh day? Maybe we’ll have a group project, maybe some special guests, maybe we’ll just take the day off. Who knows?
What are we going to make?
We’re making this up as we go along, but the general idea is: make something and share it. It might be something awesome that we’ve worked really hard at and thing people might like to see. It might be something we’ve never done before and would like to learn how to do. Some days it will probably be product of the desperate creativity engendered by artificial deadline pressure. In any case, we will have made it.
We’ve set up Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook accounts, and started a subreddit ( https://www.reddit.com/r/weekthings/ ). I’ll post links as they become relevant. How many weeks will this last? Only time will tell.