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

New Notepads, NaPoWriMo And Open Mic Nights #WeekendCoffeeShare

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March turned into a slower month than planned for me and I’m not entirely sure why that was. Perhaps it was the expectation for April and NaPoWriMo, or the relief of getting my submission in to The Poetry Business for their Book and Pamphlet Competition. Either way, I didn’t really write much in the second half of March and I feel a little guilty for letting myself slip into old habits for those two weeks. On the other hand, I’d managed to be pretty productive during January and February in terms of submissions to journals and competitions, and March isn’t particular busy when it comes to deadlines, so if you’re going to pick a month to kick back, March would be it. April has been busy with NaPoWriMo kicking off and the first week is just about to come to a close. So far I have managed to post a-poem-a-day for the prompts provided and unlike some years, I’ve found myself connecting with the official prompts. Previously I’ve sat there staring at the screen wondering …

#WeekendCoffeeShare – Submissions, Publications And Getting On With It

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It’s been almost a month since I wrote a WeekendCoffeeShare post so I feel like I’m probably overdue an entry. My last post was January 13th, less than two weeks into a new year, and now we’re chasing towards the middle of February with the same chaotic speed that always comes with being busy. One of my goals for 2019 was to try and get some more poems and short stories published online and continue putting myself forward for writing competitions. So far this seems to be going relatively well. While I didn’t get anywhere in the Write Out Loud poetry competition that I entered in December, the two poetry submissions I made to The Drabble and Ink Sweat & Tears were both accepted and have now been published. ‘Until The Light Gets In’ went up in January and ‘Newborn‘ was published this morning. I’m now in the process of working on my next round of submissions for a few other sites and journals in the hopes that I can keep this momentum going. Aside for …

#WeekendCoffeeShare -Happy Poems Are Still Not My Thing

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It’s Sunday already and so far this morning I’ve managed to procrastinate and avoid doing any sort of constructive work. To be fair there’s quite a bit that I could be getting on with. I have an exam on Thursday and another the following Tuesday, there’s a submission deadline for Barren Magazin. today that I wanted to have something written for, and I still have a number of poems that I wanted to go over and redraft. Instead of doing that though, I’ve decided to write this post and fetch myself another brew to see if I can kick my brain into some sort of functioning gear. This week life has gone back to its normal routines. This has meant that my evenings were a little busier than usual and I didn’t get the chance to post as much to my blog as I wanted to. This year I’m trying not to get myself down about that. I know it means that I don’t get the same rate of stats on the site but I’m …

Getting A Head-start On The New Year – If We Were Having Coffee

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I could look back on 2018 and bemoan the fact that I didn’t finish writing my novel, I could grump about not winning any of the competitions that I entered, or I could pout about once again failing to come up with any sort of posting schedule for my blog. Instead, I’m going to see this year out by having a look at the things I did achieve with my writing this year, and how I’m going to build on that next year.

If We Were Having Coffee: Novel Redrafts And Flash Fiction Competition #amwriting

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It’s been a while since I’ve written a Weekend Coffee Share post, months in fact, but I’m currently supposed to writing an entry for the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Competition so this seemed like the perfect way to procrastinate. I signed up late for Camp NaNoWriMo this month. At the start of the month I was debating whether or not I was going to have a crack at it and decided not to because I tend to find that writing purely for word-count goals make it even harder for me to get myself into the right frame of mind for writing. That said, having  a goal in mind does help drive me forward on projects so when I started rewriting my Shadow Dawn novel around the 10th July, I decided that I’d set myself a 30,000 word goal for the month and use Camp NaNoWriMo to help me hit that target. I’ve got more time to focus on my writing this month as  I’m still waiting for the result of my last AAT Level 3 …

How Not To Write – Doing Battle With Perfection

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Have you ever sat down and written the first three lines of something, only to hit the backspace like a maniac a few moments later? It’s so easy to throw out work if it doesn’t seem to be going in the direction that you want it to, and often that can lead to us spinning in circles, rewriting the same sentence over and over again. I know this because it’s something I do repeatedly. For example, I’m currently holding my 70,000 word manuscript over the metaphorical bin because I can’t see how it will end. The plot is rambling and half-baked, I’ve got characters that aren’t where they need to be, the whole thing feels like a failure. In short I want to throw it away and start from scratch. But! If I do that there’s a good chance I’ll never actually get finishing the damn thing because next time I hit a snag in the draft, I’ll want to start over all over again. Instead I’m going to remind myself of a Neil Gaiman …

NaPoWriMo Wrap Up – Megha Sood

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Megha Sood is an avid reader, loves to sing, an ardent lover of poetry and sometimes can scribble few lines too. She has worked in the IT field for almost a decade as a manager, worked crazy hours and traveled around the world. She is also a contributing author at GoDogGO Cafe,Whisper and the Roar and Poets Corner. Her works have been featured in GoDogGoCafe, Whisper and the Roar, Duane Poetree, Visual Verse, Poets Corner, Modern poetry, Spillwords,Indian periodicals and soon to be featured in Literary heist,Morality park, Poets head and many more. You can find her work at meghasworldsite.wordpress.com How it started: This is my first time taking part in NaPOWriMo as I started writing poetry last September. Being on the author panel of few literary collectives, I was already aware of April being the National Poetry Month and I decided to roll out an anthology about the “Sexual Exploitation of Women”on my personal blog .While researching about the National poetry Month I came to know about the #NaPoWriMo started by Maureen Thompson and …

NaPoWriMo Wrap Up – Alison Aldridge

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Alison Aldridge is a blogger and writer of fiction novels. Her short romance story was published in the Scribblers Anthology to raise money for the Children’s Hospice. She maintains a personal blog on writing and organic beauty. She has contributed articles to third parties on gaming, fashion industry and writing. She was one of the first featured writers on Opuss for her poetry. Alison has delivered courses to develop the English skills of her students. As well as education, Alison has experience as a model. She is a member of Scribblers, a local writers group and enjoys attending the annual Felixstowe Book Festival. Alison is an active member of many online writing communities. Alison is currently reworking Drift, a coming of age Young Adult novel about a mermaid and first love as well as other YA fiction projects. Why I took the challenge: This was my first year attempting the NaPoWriMo challenge to write 30 poems in 30 days. I hadn’t even heard of the challenge before I started. Posting one poem a day sounded …

NaPoWriMo Wrap Up – Frank Ray/PCGuyIV

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While I don’t necessarily hide my real name, as my Smashwords and Facebook accounts both use it, I had started blogging as PCGuyIV well before I had either of those, and just never bothered to change it. I do kind of like the artificial anonymity it provides, but I don’t make a big deal about it if someone actually calls me by my name in a comment. Of course, when I started blogging, I wasn’t doing it for the sake of blogging, but rather for the sake of showing off my skills with HTML and CSS, though I quickly learned to enjoy the writing process as well. But that’s just blogging in general. I didn’t get around to the poetry thing unil a bit later. Whereas my decent into madness…er…I mean, my attempts at blogging began back in 2005, or maybe even earlier, I didn’t start posting poetry on my blogs until 2014. And that brings me to this year, when I found out about NaPoWriMo. I wish I could say exactly what possessed me …

NaPoWriMo Wrap Up – My Valiant Soul

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First up in our series of guests posts for May is Devika Mathur from My Valiant Soul. I asked her to tell me about how she found taking part in NaPoWriMo and to provide us with her favorite piece that she created during the month. Devika is a published poetess residing in a country of stratified colours, India. Her work has been published/scheduled in Visual Verse, Sick lit Mag,Kitab.org, Subterranean blue poetry among various others. A lover of Oxymoron and words and a teacher, she loves to dance to rest her anxiety. The national poetry month was not an easy thing to comprehend. I took a pause and wrote my stress disguised as poetry like a thunder, one could say. It made me sturdy from within and outside. The poetry month is like a spring that soothes one’s soul. Healing with emotions.   Time & You I was the one with bruises and stones in my mirror-eyed reflection a reflection of you, mother the cacophony of time and hours floating inside your eyes, the heaviness of pebbles …