He’s right, you could go on forever…. Today’s prompt was inspired by the GloPoWriMo interview with poet Peter Davis. As he indicates there, his latest book is rooted in endlessly writing ideas for band names. Today, the challenge was to try this out yourself by writing a list poem in which all the items are made-up names.
It’s Global Poetry Month again! The prompt is a love poem… I was thinking about genetics the other day, and how modern life means we’re all merging our gene pools. Which, in a way, is the ultimate act of love. I am travelling so this jet-lagged piece is meant to be read in a sloow “Yellow/ ‘Oh Yeah'” voice to matchmytreaclebrain.
Welcome to 2018! I’ve found it was useful to talk about writing goals at various points in the past so this is my housekeeping/ looking forward/ looking back blog for the year. Partly for my own reference but I’ve also got a question for you guys!
I’ve also updated my About me page and added a new pic.
Taking stock: according to my submissions document, in 2017 I had 32 rejections and 4 acceptances. They say you should aim for 100 rejections per year so I only got a third of the way there. Partly this is because I only have about 6 hours ‘writing time’ per week but mostly because I really slowed down on sending submissions for various reasons, including making a decision not to pay for any submissions/reading fees/competition entries. Three acceptances were short stories, one is a poem that’s still in the pipeline. I love my poems but I guess in general the lit journals don’t? Or maybe I’m too impatient and I just publish all the best ones here 😉
My writing plans for 2017 were as follows
have a reasonable first draft of the novel by mid-year to give to early readers to feed back on – Not even close, I’ve barely touched my novel, although I did have a brainwave for a new start the other day, watch this space
(self-?) publish a chapbook of poetry and/or publish or contribute to a book of short stories – The more I think about this, I don’t think I’m ready yet. I need to keep writing poems and consider themes etc. before I go there.
record more poems – let’s say 6. At least one every two months – I achieved this and more, yay! Check out my soundcloud!
perform some poetry live to an audience at least once (eek!) – haven’t made much headway here
make a bit of money off my creative writing (ie: non-journalism) – not so far, still hopeful!
get at least five pieces published in places that are not Claire-controlled: journals etc. – I made this target, if I include my upcoming poem and this writeCon writeup I had in The Woolf
And I finished the #26Cantons25Weeks project. Woo hoo! As I say in the Woolf story, it was a valuable lesson to learn from Diccon Bewes about the amount of work it would take to potentially spin a project such as this into a book. Food for thought…
Writing goals 2018
I’m at a point where I really need a paid job. Both for myself and due to family circumstances. So I’ll be focusing on that for the next couple of months, which will mean less blogging. At this stage, I’ve had to be a bit tough with myself and decide I won’t even think about novel writing, short stories or poems too much while I focus on the job-hunt. It’s make or break time.
I’m sure a few poems will pop out, and maybe some travel stuff, but I need to give myself permission not to feel bad about putting my creativity on hold (sob!) to focus on finding work. And unfortunately, due to some travel in April, I won’t be able to participate in GloPoWriMo global poetry month this year either. 😦
Otherwise from that, I guess my goals remain much as above… I will revisit it all in May.
A few other bits and pieces:
I have created a Facebook author page if you want to ‘like’ me on there. It is mostly just publicising my blog posts at this stage but hoping to share a few articles and maybe have more writer-type discussions there. https://www.facebook.com/clairedoblewriter/
I’ve started using Twitter a bit more and I’m @Carabosse there
AND FINALLY…
I made this poll a while back and never published it. I was going to ask you, my readers, what you would you like to see in the next, say, six to twelve months, from Clairevetica?
Since this is mostly a place for me to write whatever, I don’t promise I’ll actually follow your advice. But it would be nice to know what some of you think!
Please feel free to pm/ speak / email me with your thoughts as well
I wanted to use this line ‘the undertow and the overthrow’ since reading it in a poem by Aurora Phoenix, it seemed to fit here on a poem musing about Lake Geneva, how it’s so big and yet people seek to own it and/or make private property of it. How can we own nature? Water is part of us. And yet clean water is a privilege and a commodity. Not sure I entirely captured it (!) but need a few poems to break up the ‘cantons’ …
Photo: the fence of a chateau on Lake Geneva (snapped by me!)
clairevetica 