October In My Passion Planner

I have not used a Passion Planner in a very long time. The system, although once so important to my daily life, no longer fits my needs. This is in NO way meant as an insult or meant in a derogatory manner in any way. I still love Passion Planner.

I also still have a stash of various different planners and even a notebook from Passion Planner that are sitting on a shelf a year or two later, waiting to be…repurposed.

Last year, I set up a large Passion Planner daily for October. I set up both the monthly and the daily pages. I added days and dates. I added washi tape. I even made a flip-through of the journal once I finished dating it.

I didn’t do anything else to the entire planner. Although I was certain I would be using the same notebook for November and December of that year, I didn’t want to get ahead of myself while setting it up.

It’s a good thing that I didn’t. I didn’t end up using the planner at all last year. In fact, I put it up…and actually could not find it for some time afterward.

For some reason, this year, I decided I wanted that planner and I wanted to use it.

I think I was planning to make some artwork every day or something along those lines. At this point, I don’t even remember.

It took me about a month and a half to find that safe place I had stashed this journal. It was nowhere near any other planner, notebook, journal, or even book in this house. That is saying a lot here.

I found it about a week into this past October. I had nearly given up on trying to find it, but then, there it was, out of nowhere.

That night I looked it over to see what I felt I could keep and what needed to be covered up, changed, or whatever else.

I had started working through the ‘This Month’s Gamechanger Goal’ page. I left that all alone.

The monthly spread I simply glued one page to the other, so now technically that no longer exists. I considered whiting things out and renumbering the month, but in the end, I was too lazy.

I glued scrapbook paper over pieces and places that I wanted to get rid of, but didn’t feel like whiting out or anything like that. Places like the name plate, little places where I had written different things, that sort.

Since I used plain old school glue to glue the pages together and to glue the scrapbooking paper down, I let everything dry overnight.

The next day, I picked up a pen and I didn’t stop until the end of the month.

Every day I filled in a page or two (in order to catch up with the days I had missed before finding the planner). On the page titled ‘Space Of Infinite Possibility (R)’, I wrote story ideas and prompts. Some days, I would write out a single sentence. Other days would have several different prompts, paragraphs, and more.

Several pages begin with the words: “What If…” and then I would write. Sometimes I would write streams of questions continuing on the what-if vein. Other times, I would start with the what-if and continue going with whatever came up, fleshing out more details.

On one page, I have a list of scary book titles to use as prompts. Another page has a list of horror movies to use as prompts.

My favorite ideas though came from watching John Carpenter’s The Thing and the prequel The Thing. The what-if ideas started to flow with those two movies and took me off on amazing tangents.

What am I going to do with all of these prompts?

It will not be an instant process, but I will be using these prompts to write actual stories…or longer. Some of these are not simple tales.

Sitting down for a few minutes every day for the entire month to come up with something to write about, to generate ideas, was terrific. A little bit here and there every day netted more ideas for me than a single hour-long brainstorming session.

My only vexation is trying to figure out what I want to do with the other two empty months in this planner.