The rain gods - are they with me or agin me?

I go to hang some washing out . . . spots of rain . . . so I think maybe I'll make a start on clearing the shed . . .and I just heave a load of stuff on to the lawn, and it pours. . . back to old faithful computer, and lo! the skies are clearing.   Maybe it's time for a coffee and a scone?  And even better - Harry's just volunteered to make it!

At the risk of rabbiting on about nothing to a greater extent than usual - yay, I cleaned out the shed, and stuck two loads of washing out, and had scones with clotted cream at coffee time.

And I managed to take a carful of wood, plastic and metal rubbish to the recycling centre - local tip.

Another random entry:

Written as part of an article about self-editing for the aborted WD mag.

'A poem is never finished', said Paul Valéry, 'only abandoned.' This is the current abandoned version. To be fair the whole enterprise this was planned for was abandoned too!

How do you get your poem to scan?
Do you bang with a spoon on the base of a pan?
Do you count all your words or just hope that they flow
Do you edit, fuhgeddit, or let it all blow?

Do you sing words along to the tune of a song?
Do you bounce rubber balls or yourself off the walls?
Whatever you do keep it up if it works,
Make poetry fun with these physical jerks.

Do you let raw emotion roar out on the page
or force the caged tiger to swallow his rage?
Do you prune out the clichés with merciless knife
and throw out excess words that drain it of life?

Can you rhyme all the time or is rhyming too pat?
Do you scour the thesaurus, or do without that?
Sometimes you may find that a word from a book
can lead you up roads where you’d not thought to look.

March 08

The original was more fun, because the mechanism was visible.

WritersDock Poetry Competition Winners

1st - Sabita Banerji More Gardened Against Than Gardening

2nd - Grace Galton Awakening

3rd - Geoff Lowe Death Comes in Two Parts

You can read the winning entries here.

I act as a moderator for WD, but as someone who didn't enter or judge the competition, I'd like to congratulate the winners, and the judging team, and say how much I enjoyed all three poems.

Poems and meanings

I've had an interesting experience with a poem I posted on Writers' Dock.

Dream on

She used to live as if
as if it really were,
in spite of lacking evidence
or truth.

She lived in wish-horse land
a beggar finely mounted,
on a wild white stallion
riding
windy stormscapes
in a sordid little house
she didn’t see.

When she died she left the sadness
of a life of might-have-beens:
a pile of clothes unmended,
of stories never written
and a bookcase full of stories of escape.

As I wrote it, it was the simple tale of someone who lives inside her head, ignoring the reality around her, and dreams her life away without attempting to act on either dreams or reality. The saying 'if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride' is behind the second stanza.

Of course there are inelegant parts, and the repetition of 'stories' was pointed out, with justification. Other words could be removed, though I want to keep the rhythm I feel when I speak it.

Then, someone saw it as being about a heroin addict with the references to 'horse' 'white' and stormscapes'
'...horse as heroin, gives wish-horse as the illusory dreams of the drug, a beggar gives me the feel of a desperate person, and again the white stallion as the white powder of the drug itself, windy stormscapes reminded me of references to taking the drug as riding the storm with the sordid little house being the body which she no longer feels a need for as rides the drug-fuelled high.
The last line now reads more as a reference to her secret stash of the drug which still holds all the dreams she never got to have.'

I claimed that my subconscious works in mysterious ways, but am surprised how well the interpretation fits the poem.

One of my daughters on the other hand, looked at it and said - 'Oh no, it's one of your get off your arse and do something poems again.' Time I did, then?

Writers' Dock Poetry Competition

This competition closes on March 31st. Cost £3 for one poem, £6 for three. First prize £100.

WD is a website which started when the BBC Get Writing site closed in 2005. Writers of all standards can post their work and discuss it with others. The emphasis is on constructive feedback, rather than simply telling people their work is great or crap.

I've been a moderator on there for about two and a half years alongside a dedicated and competent bunch of people.

Keeping track of myself

OK. Last month I planned to post at least a short piece each day on WD - it didn't happen, but I wasn't too far off, and I have been blogging.
And since I last totted it all up (February 23rd), I've written a sonnet for a challenge. Topic (chosen by me) anything but love. I was all Valentined out after last month's challenge.
I've also posted a couple of very quickly written flash poems from prompts.

We've been discussing the 'to be continued' story idea - someone writes about 100 words, and others add their 100 words to it. At least two of us admit we have trouble writing endings.
So next week, I'm going to post 100 words, and we'll use it in two ways. One will be as normal, as the start of a story. For the second version, others will write the 100 words leading up to that situation, and so on backwards. Until we arrive at a beginning?

Yeah? Write?

Ok this month's 'score' - nothing submitted to anywhere serious.

On Writers' Dock I have posted:

• one challenge poem;
• three flash poems - written from a prompt in less than 30 minutes - usually a lot less;
• three flash 'stories' or more likely 'writing dumps' or 'expressions' - again from prompts and taking less than 30 mins;
• eighteen mini-epsiodes of stories (up to 100 words).

The mini-episodes are more fun than I expected, though it can be frustrating when someone changes a character's personality, or (in one of these stories) whizzes everyone off in the time machine, just as I thought I'd set up an interesting situation.

Hey, it might just teach me a little about plot and character though.

All of these have something in common. Because they're all generated by an external stimulus, I feel less exposed and less constrained by the writing that emerges from them. Interesting.

To write perchance?

I would like to set myself a modest task - in February to average one brief post per day on WD. I really did very little writing for any sort of audience in January.

So far I have posted two flash poems, one poem for a 'challenge', and three 100-word parts of a communal story. That's six items by the 11th. I've been away for four days, but I ought to do better than this.

I have commented on several poems, some in detail. I have written the blog, and my own personal notes.