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Story Ideas from Auspicious Dates
By Deb Gallardo
I started composing this post early in the morning. Everything kept interrupting me. No exaggeration. The last straw came when the power company who has been working a few blocks away from my house accidentally messed with a phone cable and half the town lost phone service. Along with losing our dial tone, I lost my DSL connection to the Internet. Talk about a frustrating day. But I had company who likes to work, so we rearranged my living quarters. Meanwhile, this post sat unfinished and unpublished. *sigh*
Our phone service was just restored and I’m almost two hours into tomorrow. Or today is 2 hours after yesterday. BUT, some place east of the International Dateline, it is still, er, yesterday. So this isn’t totally asynchronic. (Just made that word up.) So pretend it’s yesterday, okay?
Today is one of those dates that come around only once a century. There are 12 such dates this century, and by December 12, 2012 we’ll have lived through them all:
01/01/01, 02/02/02, 03/03/03, 04/04/04, 05/05/05, 06/06/06
07/07/07, 08/08/08, 09/09/09, 10/10/10, 11/11/11, 12/12/12.
Some cultures hold certain numbers in higher esteem than others. For example, the Chinese hold the number 8 in high regard, so the date of the opening ceremonies for the 2008 Summer Olympics in China was the auspicious date of 08/08/08.
Of course the month, day and year needn’t be identical for a date to have some significance. The case could be made for:
01/02/03, 02/03/04, 03/04/05, 04/05/06, 05/06/07, 06/07/08…up to 12/13/14.
Then there are the symmetrical dates:
01/11/10, 01/22/10. This holds true for all years up through 2012.
And semi-symmetrical:
01/11/01, 01/22/01
It’s interesting to note that only the U.S. and certain countries in close affiliation to it use the format MM/DD/YY (or /YYYY). Elsewhere dates are written as DD/MM/YYYY.
But since the late twentieth century, a movement has been afoot to “internationalize” date structure, especially when it comes to computers. The accepted format for the ISO 8601 standard is YYYY/MM/DD.
No matter in what format you write the date, you can find many of note — dates that will “live in infamy,” dates that resonate whenever we hear them. I’m thinking of December 7, the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. And, of course, 9/11. There are less heavy dates like February 14 and March 17, but they’re not in the same class as days on which something cateclysmic (to us) occurred.
If you’re looking for story inspiration or for a device to move an existing story along, consider using a date that is either important to the protagonist, to mankind or to the antagonist. It could be a date in the past, today’s date or a date in the future. Give it some thought. Brainstorm some what-if’s about dates and see where that leads you. Then get writing! Make a “date” with yourself.
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