Dec. 26
One idea a day.
Welcome to Burn the Ax Handle, an experiment in creative sharing, and a daybook of occasional expansions from a chronicler, observer and journalist with 42 (respect, Douglas Adams) years’ experience.
Each day in Burn the Ax Handle I will invoke the title allegory, which to me stands for giving away the fuel of inspiration. I will post a new idea, concept, whimsy, or fragment or my imagination.
These handles are for any subscriber to use as they please: I release them for anyone to build upon.
Burn the Ax Handle is an admittedly strange encounter, and more will be explained before the first idea is released on Jan. 1.
This is an adventure. It began on New Year’s Day 2021. Each day in 2021 I set aside one idea for a total of 365 waiting for consumption.
Out of hundreds of ideas, I have kept my own stash, a private reserve of 50 or more. (New ones come along every week, too.) My unpublished collection, “Thanks for the Water,” written in 2021, contains examples of concepts I had to develop myself; as to “Cheer Chowder,” “The Evasive Wake,” “Comboverse,” and others, I leave it to readers to judge.
But as I reached my sixties I began to think of a wider purpose for all my ideas. I’ll never use them all but I hate for them to go waste. I offer them now as ideas to stand on their own, or as inspirations, or fodder.
Are some stronger than others? Certainly, but with obvious bias I will say some are brilliant concepts, alluring opportunities.
If you like it, let me know right away – I’ll post it whenever there is a taker. On Jan. 1, the folder opens with what I have titled “Small and Dry.”
Burn the Ax Handle is the embers from a 40-year trove. To my knowledge nothing like Burn the Ax Handle has ever been done and that is precisely why I undertake this adventure. Passing along these ideas is one way to keep the fuel burning.
Neumann Rea is a newspaper editor living in western Oregon. Burn the Ax Handle is his first Substack site.
What a lovely idea.
Hey NR, can’t wait for ‘22!