Found 2025
Every year the Kirkland family keeps a jar of ‘found’ coins - and once per year I do the accounting. Previously: 2024, 2023, (no 2022 post?), 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017. We’ve been doing this since 2004.
Here’s what we found in 2025!
Even fewer coins than last year; I think the approaching cashless world is cutting into this, plus our family now has two very independent teenagers. We’re not taking as many slow ambling walks as we did back when they were in elementary school.
Plus: the abolition of the penny finally happened this year. Who knows how this will affect this!
We did still pick up 147 individual coins, which adds up to $11.82, plus some miscellaneous euro Erika found in Germany and the Netherlands this summer. Tracked in our ongoing spreadsheet, of course.
As always: these coins are stored in the archive for the one-day future Erika Kirkland Museum of Found Objects.
Call for Entries part 3
We’re back! I still have a background process running in my brain about ‘places I want to commission a fiction writer’.
I’m keeping a running list of alternative fiction delivery methods that I’d like to experience. I’m not a writer, and I fundamentally do not have any interest in me personally inventing a fictional story for others.
BUT.
I love reading fiction. I love printed paper books first and foremost, but also I love digital media and the weird new things it affords for storytelling. And I’ve dipped my toe into publishing, helping make other people’s stories real.
So! Here’s a followup to previous Fiction RFP part one and part two, where I listed out some media formats I’d love to publish. And I’m serious - if you’re a writer and you want to put out a story in one of these ways, I would love to help. Call me.
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Novella in a Playbill magazine. You know the playbill programs you get at the theater? What if you used all of it to tell a story? This has so much SPACE. Mimic the format of a Playbill program for a stage production (play? musical? opera?), and use it as a not-quite-linear template for telling different parts of the story. You’ve got natural space for the setting, about the work itself, cast bios, composer bios, and ADS. What a world you could build in that space. And the printing is totally foolproof.
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Quarterback playbook wristband. Here’s the opposite. It’s sports instead of drama, it’s short instead of long. I want to commission a fiction piece that only gets published as an insert for these wristbands that football players wear. You’ve got about 3 or 6 pages. When we distribute the story, you get an actual wristband with it.
Airline pilots have a similar thing called a kneeboard too; it straps to your thigh.
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Trade Magazine. I am a longtime subscriber to niche trade magazines like Pizza Today, Parking Today, National Nut Grower. These are pretty thinly edited, and one at least has a long-running fiction story that gets published each month. But it would be fun to make a spurious trade magazine and use the whole thing - articles, advertisements, letters to the editor, etc - to tell one story.
Easy expansion of this idea to a product catalog - seems like that has to have been done before, right?
15
In This House We Believe. Libraries and Parks Departments do these ‘story walks,’ where they make outdoor signage and place them along a pathway in a park. Sometimes they’re just printing out spreads from a picture book! I’d like to take this idea and tell a story in the form of those rainbow ‘In This House We Believe…’ signs. You can make them custom, and print one-offs! I envision a story that works by walking down a suburban block where each house has one of these. Perhaps the neighbors are in conversation with each other, or telling some Rashomon-esque take on some neighborhood disturbance. H/T to Trudy on this one.
Call me already
I love the format here, but I stall out on these because I’m not a writer. I don’t have a story to tell, and without that, what’s the point?
I’m not kidding. I have some modest budget prepared for these projects, and I’m really just cruising for a writer to work with that thinks these sound fun. If you are a writer, consider this your invitation to query me!
All my favorite books have maps
All the best books have a map at the front, right? At least, all of my favorites. I love two genres: fantasy/scifi in an invented world (Narnia, Earthsea, etc) or a travelogue in an exotic place. Either way, I’m always flipping back to the front of the book to peek at the map.
But! I also often want to annotate those maps - or in some cases, I want to supply my own. So: I made plotted.io. It’s a simple little web app that lets you add maps from books and annotate them.
You can upload an image of a map - like the drawing on those first pages - of the fantasy world. Or if the story you’re interested in happens in the ‘real world’ (even in fiction), you can choose a ‘real world’ map to annotate.
I have a personal reading journal site, but that’s only for me. I’m the only one who can post there. But Plotted is for everyone! Anybody can grab an account and add a map.
A great example of this is Dracula. The core of the story happens in two places: Transylvania and England. it’s fun to explore a map of where those places really ARE. And there are a couple of plot-relevant journeys in the book (the voyage of the Demeter, and the final race back to Transylvania) where actually knowing the geography really adds to the story. When Dracula causes a storm and fog, the ship Demeter wanders right through the English channel, without a chance to stop for help. Stoker’s original audience would understand this intuitively, but I sure didn’t as an American. Seeing this on a map really drives the story home!
But I think it’s also just as fun when you annotate a fictional place. Like: when you read The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, didn’t you want to visualize all the crossing paths of Aiden Bishop? I know I did. So I made a map!
This is a little half-baked for now, but it absolutely scratches my itch. I can:
- upload a map
- associate it with a book
- draw lines on the map
- add pins on the map
- and label things
- and share that map with others
Is this going to satisfy the real obsessives? Probably not. For fiction worlds where there is a deep bench of expertise - Middle-Earth, Westeros, etc - there’s already going to be some other mapping project. But for the rest of us, we can use this.
Sprout Sign
Here’s a silly project that came out of an actual client conversation!
Sprout Sign is a baby horoscope tool. Enter in your child’s birthdate, and the STARS will tell you about your child’s future!
We’re working on a state-funded project now at Brand New Box about getting early childhood resources to people, and one of my left-field ideas was: what about the kind of folks who trust woo-woo Instagram more than like, their pediatricians? Is there a way we can speak that language?
I jokingly suggested: what if there’s an online Tarot reading, but the cards just tell you to get your kids vaccinated?
I loved this idea, goofy as it is. And we spitballed into other new-age spiritual models: astrology! I couldn’t resist just making it, even though (of course?) it’s not something that we’ll really publish with actual tax dollars, but it’s something that I can absolutely make for fun!
So: here’s a astrology tool for the crystal crowd, where every horoscope result just tells you what childhood vaccinations to get next, from the official CDC vaccination schedule*.
( * I used the CDC immunization schedule from June 2025. Will we have recommended vaccinations in the future? Or maybe we’ll all just get measles, who knows)
Beaver Cosplay
I’ve never really identified with people that do cosplay stuff. Like yes, the craft and artistry of those costumes are amazing! But I’m just too GenX to really accept the idea of me, personally, dressing up as something from a movie. Right?
Anyways, lately I’ve been on a low-key mission the last few months to make people watch HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS. This includes: family, friends, and everybody who works at Brand New Box. Haven’t seen it? Imagine a 90-minute Looney Tunes but that looks like this:
That hat is incredible Halloween costume material, right?
SO: The movie has been video-on-demand for a while now, but THIS week it was playing for one night only at my local arthouse theater. I couldn’t resist doing a 1-hr craft project to make my own hat.
Add a crumpled paper bag for a raccoon tail and a lick of paint - and we’re off to the theater.
