I’m not the only one who thinks this, but I tend to be a tiny bit of a Spindlewheel purist. I love to fuck around with the formats of the cards as much as the next person, but there’s a magic to the styles of Sasha’s decks. And I’ve never been particularly skilled at putting my own spin on things.
Despite that, writing a new Spindlewheel card every day has really made me break out of my shell in a lot of ways. At the beginning of this project I tried very hard to not repeat words and concepts if at all possible, but at time of publication we’re a hundred and eighty days into the year, and I only know so many words. (That’s been another thing— the forced expansion of my vocabulary.)
The other big thing has been to really refine my thoughts and my poetry into twelve words a side. You might notice at the top of the year I tend towards trinities on sides; three distinct ideas, offset by commas, reversed to another three distinct ideas. I like the rhythm of threes. There’s something magical about it that I don’t feel with couplets or quartets. But June has shown how I can really blossom with writing only one general idea that contains, within it, separate images. I’ve got a few favorites from prior to June, but I really think the city cards— inspired by wanting to create cities for Caro’s i’m sorry did you say street magic— are some of my best work so far.
The place where I am breaking free from the typical Spindlewheel deck is in how I categorize my cards. At the beginning of the year my cards could typically be traced back to something that happened during that day. As the pandemic turned my life into more of an endless cycle, that got harder, but you can still see relics of gameplay in the Artefacts deck. There’s about seven Doppleganger cards and a couple I’m calling Curses. Kisses are just what they sound like, and Migraines are how I get away with still writing a card when I’m caught up in so much pain. You’ll notice they’re basically gibberish— they’re in ROT ciphers. The key to which ROT cipher is which number they are. They won’t be in ROT on the cards themselves because I don’t expect anyone to try and type things in manually; it’s only on twitter they’re ciphered. (Part of this is also so I don’t have to un-ROT them every time I want to see what I wrote.) And then June, as evidenced by how most of them begin, is the Cities deck.
Solstice and Equinox are two of my four Engines for this year. Not to give away my entire hand, or Sasha’s, but I can’t stop thinking about machine games.
I’m going to leave it here for now. I can’t say I have “big plans” for the second half of Spindleyear, because it’s still primarily a journaling tool for me and as life gears back up there may be some shifts in thought and execution over the second half of the year. But I have had some ideas, and I do still have a list of seeds for cards on days when I’m stuck. So it’ll be fun to see where it goes from here.
(By the by, though most of these cards are by nature of being journal entries unplayable, there are a few I’d like to put together into expansion decks once the year is over and I can lay them all out. We’ll see.)
(for more of my artist statements, follow this link)
