Cocoon Year: The Worst Month

Here’s a casual ranking of the months of the year. I really like October and November. Most other months are quite good for me, as the type of person who hunkers down by a large window and hopes rain will fall. June is all right, if a little sunny. All July has going for it is one poorly-designed holiday and traumatized cats.

And then the heat waves start.

August.

August is the worst month of the year for any vampire hermiting inside of a house without central air conditioning, and it’s easy to feel why.

Outside, the sunlight pierces, the air hangs humidly, my shirts get stinky and wet. Inside, the flies set up camp in the compost and my ears ring with the noise pollution of the portable air conditioner. A previously-walkable neighborhood becomes hostile. The asphalt soaks up sunrays and my feet sweat through the soles of my shoes. I become trapped in my own house. I must serve the whims of the housecat, who insists on all the windows being open lest she shred the blinds with her claws.

So anyway, August is my least favorite month. The office isn’t terribly comfortable and the cooler basement is a little too distracting to do much in.

Which is why I signed up to do SAWgust this year. This volunteer-run event is 31 days devoted to dreaming up a comics-related project and then getting it done. It is three years old as of this year. In year one, I created Amphiox. In year two, I ducked out very early on for lack of a concrete plan.

SAWgust is hosted on a MightyNetwork site. It is 100% free to join, even late.  

This year, I finally had an outline for Warlock’d, and a battle plan for what each scene was meant to portray in the story. So it naturally meant that that’s what I would do.

Goal: 120 pages in typical screenplay format.

As a little way of giving back to this community event, I decided to supply daily prompts to provoke other people into sharing about their projects. The prompts all have discussion questions that I may reveal later, but they also all look like this and can be used like Inktober prompts where necessary.

As a result of volunteering, I was very late writing my blog post here. I hope to include further Cocoon Year posts as part of my SAWgust progress. Already, I’m making a lovely amount of progress on my screenplay version of this story.

August is the worst month, but at least I have SAWgust!