All posts filed under: Blog

Updates from the day-to-day about various writing projects, special guest posts, and any other events that may come up

Call For Guest Posts – #NaPoWriMo Wrap Up

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We’re starting to close in on the halfway mark for National Poetry Writing Month so I would like see who would be interested in taking part in a Guest Post project this May. The plan is for each contributor to submit a post that contains their favorite poem (their own work) from this year NaPoWriMo challenge, and a little bit about how they found trying to write thirty poems in thirty days. You don’t have to go into too much detail with these posts, it’s more of a showcase of what NaPoWriMo can produce and the amazing quality of poetry that can be found here on WordPress. If you want to join in then please send me an email at caroljforrester@hotmail.com and leave a comment below so that I know to look out for it. (Hotmail loves to junk emails from strangers I’ve noticed.) I’ve had once poet say their in so far and that is My Valiant Soul but there are many more days to be filled in May if you’re interested. So, what …

Voices behind the words: An interview series with writers, (Interview #10, Carol J Forrester)

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Originally posted on Real Free – Flowing Words:
Welcome readers to another entry on Voices behind the words: An interview series with writers. It’s the beginning of a new month which means another guest joins me on this series. I’m going to try my best to be concise in this interview excerpt. This time around I spoke with Carol J Forrester of Writing and Works and I asked her about the pros and cons about blogging on WordPress, her rankings on the blogging experience, and what she wants her readers to obtain from reading her work. In addition, she gave an interesting perspective on creative writing in schools and left a blurb from a newspaper article (at the bottom of the page) that explained the negligence in motivating students who would like to partake in learning and practicing poetry. All in all, in terms of information, this is the 2nd most densely packed interviews I’ve done. It’s quite long but I perceive that as a testament to my improvement in conducting these interviews. Check out…

If We Were Having Coffee: A Quarterly Review – Muddling Through 2018

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The end of March is closing in and the first quarter of the year is almost done, so now seems about as good a time as any to take a look back over the last three months and see if I’ve managed to get any closer to completing my 2018 goals. Even if you don’t make new years resolutions, we each have targets that we want to see ourselves achieve. Some are small such as finally sorting through that box of pens that moved back home with you from uni, some are larger, like completing the next stage of your accountancy qualifications. Either way, it is important to acknowledge whether or not we achieve them, and if we haven’t, what progress we’ve made and what we need to do to reach that goal. Writing Goals: 2018 Each year, for the last six years, I’ve told myself that I will finish writing that novel. That novel is still unfinished, but it’s certainly closer to being complete than it’s ever been. This month I managed to write …

Right, Time To Get Things Moving Around Here #WeekendCoffeeShare

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So it’s been a while since I wrote a chatty, update post. So long in fact that the original ‘If We Were Having Coffee’ seems to have fizzled into non-existence. But anyway, what have I been up to since August. Well I’m still working on Shadow Dawn. The draft is now past the 70,000 words mark and I’ve had to go back to the start as I feel like I’ve completely lost track of what I intended to do with the book when I started writing it. On the plus side, I reread a chapter from about half way through and didn’t hate it so there might be hope for this story yet.  For the past week I’ve managed to churn out more poetry than I have done over the last three months. If you follow the site you’ve probably noticed the upturn in the activity and I’m trying to keep things that way. I’ve started posting more flash fiction based on writing prompts from Story Shack and I’m trying to put up something for …

Rhyme In Poetry: Discuss

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If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you might have noticed that I tend to write in free verse and I don’t use a lot of rhyme. The main reason for this is that I find rhyme can force poets to try and fit words into poems that simply don’t belong. In some cases it even leads to words being created completely out of the blue (which I don’t have a problem with per-say, but if you’re doing it to fit a rhyme scheme, you’re not doing it for the right reasons). When I sit down to write a poem I try and hammer the first four lines out and then I let the poem take me where it’s going to take me. Then I go back and find the lines I really like, delete the rest and re-write the poem based on those. Each time I make an edit I read the whole poem aloud before moving on to the next amendment. I do this to make sure the poem sounds right. I …

Finding Focus – #WeekendCoffeeShare

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If we were having coffee, well first of all I’d have to offer an apology, this weekend seems to have gotten away from me. Sunday evening has crept up and before I really understood what was happening, the weekend is pretty much over. However, I feel like I’m ending on a positive note. On Saturday I ordered a copy of Stephen King’s book The Gunslinger and today it arrived. I was surprised by how thin it was, curiosity led me to google, and I went in search of the exact word count of the book. Turns out that it only just breeches the 60,000 word mark. Now, for the past six months I’ve been worry about the length of my book. The bulk of the fantasy novels that I own stretch into the 200,000 to 300,000 word mark and I was concerned that Shadow Dawn wouldn’t be a long enough book. However, it’s already longer than ‘The Gunslinger’ and I think I might be putting too much focus on word counts and chapter lengths. I …

How To Create A Blogging Schedule – Three Tips On Building A Schedule For Writers

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One of my main focuses this month has been to create some sort of schedule for Writing and Works to try to get more organised with my posting. This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to tackle this challenge, in fact I’ve put together a few schedules over the last seven years, but in the end they all fell apart. Despite these failures, the fact remains that having a blogging schedule helps to grow your audience and it can help keep you on track when inspiration is running low. Having a plan can also keep you from running out of steam and it lets your readers know what to expect. For example, there are some blogs that I visit on the same day each week because I know they will be positing something that I’ll be interested in on that day. I know their schedules and I follow them as a reader. So, today I am going to go through three points that I’ve found helpful while trying to build a blogging schedule. You might …

What Are Little Girls Made Of?: Breaking The Stereotypes In My Head

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What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and all things nice That’s what little girls are made of. You know something, until I was eleven, ‘SUGAR!’ was a swear word. Mum didn’t want to swear in front of my sister and I so she’d say ‘Sugar’ instead. I even got in trouble for copying her once, which looking back seems a little ridiculous as I wasn’t technically swearing, and it hasn’t stopped me cursing as an adult. She does swear in front of my sister and I from time to time these days, but sugar has remained fairly prominent in the family vocabulary. It’s quite amusing. Aside from being my family’s swear word substitute, sugar is also one of the key ingredients in creating little girls. If you have any snips, snails, or puppy dogs tails lying around then you can make yourself a little boy instead, but for this post we’re going to be focusing on the feminine. Nothing personal, I just have the first hand knowledge to go with that half …

I’ve Broken My Own Writing Rules. Again! #WeekendCoffeeShare

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It’s Sunday morning afternoon, and I’m trying to keep a close eye on the weather outside because we’re meant to be having an afternoon of rain and there’s washing on the line. Actually, we’re meant to be having an entire August of rain here in the UK. According to the Independent (I only read the headline), this last week’s saturation of sudden, miserable downpours, is here to stay for the entire thirty-one days. I only mention this because writing this post might get interrupted by me blitzing outside like a made woman to yank in the majority of my wardrobe before it gets soaked. Besides the weather turning against me this week, things have been going surprisingly well. I started a new job on the 17th August and it feels like I settling in okay, my writing has been on the upturn, and things around the house seem to be on an even keel. There’s just one thing bugging me, and that’s the fact I’m breaking my own rule when it comes to writing. I’ve …

Why Am I Even Doing This? – Tips From Seven Years Of Blogging

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I started this blog seven years ago and in that time it’s growth has been small but steady. I’m not a fantastic blogger. I take breaks too often, forget to post, throw up stuff before it’s probably ready, but over the past seven years I do seem to have to have gathered a group of followers who comment and like regularly. Who offer the sort of support that helps in the moments when I’m wondering why I even bother to pick up a pen or sit down at a keyboard. Today I wanted to write a post about how to blog successfully. I wasn’t sure that I’m qualified to write that post so instead I’m going to write a post that lists seven of the most important things I’ve learnt during my time on WordPress. Hopefully they will be of use and for those of you who make it to the end, it might even be an enjoyable read. 1. Tags Are Vital But Don’t Overdo It! We’re going to start at the basics. I …