Cup the whole of me in one hand.
Hold my belly up to a light,
judge my origins,
if I might be the real deal.
Examine my spine carefully
through this sheen of skin
while I burn like paper,
edges curling in as I smoke.
Test the me between teeth,
bite down, heads up,
crack your enamel
on my silver forked tail.
Spit me free
with blood and tooth
and every question asked
to test the mettle in me.
Wonder why I leave
with a word like love
so sour in my mouth
I choke.
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 also aware that I have a pretty good core readership so a lot of my views are return readers. I’m not necessarily reaching more people by posting daily, the same people are just coming back more often, and I don’t want to be the person spamming my readers with post after post after post. Not posting every day also means I can be more strict with the quality of what I’m putting up on this site and really that’s what will drive readership in the long run.
Despite being busier this week I’ve managed to write some poetry that I’m really proud of. I now have twenty of the sixty poems that I wanted to put into a collection and the majority of them are pieces that haven’t been published on this blog. I did worry that I’d struggle to write the poems for this collection but I’ve found since deciding to pull it together I’ve been writing poems that have been mulling around my brain for years. It’s a little like a dam has been knocked down and I’ve managed to work out how to tell the stories I’ve been holding onto.
I’ve also discovered that happy poems are still not my forte. I’ve been writing about my grandmother breaking off her engagement at eighteen to leave Ireland, my mother sending my sister away to her mother-in-law’s during the first lambing season after my sister was born, and dealing with the death of friends. I have one poem which I am calling ‘The Token Happy Poem’ which I’ve thrown in just to make the collection seem a little less depressing.
I’ve also been jotting down lists of submission windows for poetry magazines to try and get some of my poems published during 2019. I don’t want to self-publish so I need to create a CV of publications where my work has been accepted in order to gain enough traction to and convince a published that they should take on my work. It will also give me something to update my ‘about‘ page with as at the moment the features on their are three or four years old at least. 
That’s about it for me week. If you are working on submitting pieces for publication this year I’d love to hear from you in the comments below. How are you finding it? Did you pick up any useful tips along the way? Do you mostly write poems for submission (poems based on prompts/competitions) or do you write poems and then consider submitting them afterwards? If you’re willing to share I’d love to listen.
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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 exam which means I haven’t got any studying to do. However, other social engagements are taking up most of my weekends so my current progress has been limited to what I can write during my lunch hour at work. Hence the pitiful looking bar chart above.
As I mentioned at the start of this post, I’m also taking part in the NYC Midnight’s Flash Fiction competition. The deadline for round one is 4am (GMT) so I’ve got the rest of this afternoon to sort out my 1,000 words story and submit it, even if the heat is making it almost impossible for me to get on with anything. I’d rather melt than write at the moment so I’m hoping hammering out a post might encourage me to hammer out a thousand words of fiction in a few minutes time. I can easily write a thousand words in a hour so a first draft should be straight forward, I just wish the weekend wouldn’t slip past me so quickly.
*Note: It’s now almost five in the evening as I’ve been procrastinating from writing this post as well. I really need to learn to just get on with things.*
Tomorrow will mark DVerse Poets Pub coming back off their two week break, something I’ve been looking forward to since their first day of absence. For the last fortnight I’ve been desperate for poetry prompt so I can’t wait until Monday’s Quadrille night.
I’m also trying to work out how to take my poetry to the next level on this poem. When going through the stats on this site I realize that I only reach about fifty views per post most of the while so I’d really like to start bumping that number up. I suppose the upside to that total is that my view total stays quite close to my likes total so I can see that most people who read the poems, go on to liking them. I just need to find a way of getting more people reading them.
Other than that there isn’t much going on this weekend. I hope yours have been slightly more productive than mine and I will now go off and get this flash fiction piece written for NYC Midnight before I find a way to procrastinate right up to the deadline. All the best for the next week and thanks for reading.
You doled out temper tantrums like hard gums,
sugar flecked jellies
that locked my jaw
kept me mute
while you spun words into waterfalls and rapids
that broke over me
like I was nothing more than rock
carved out to test your anger upon.
Daily Post: Froth
I’ve been writing longer poems for NaPoWriMo this month so I went with a simple quardille for today’s daily post prompt.
Good Afternoon lovely readers. This week we’re still on spiced apple cider instead of tea and coffee I’m afraid. There are six bottles of the stuff still in the kitchen and I’m trying to judge if they’re anywhere close to going off? I don’t suppose you fancy taking one home with you?
This weekend has been something of a trying one and no, I’m afraid I’m not talking about the Tim Burton movie though I will have to watch that at some point in the coming week. This weekend has been a nightmare for some much more mundane reasons.
Firstly, I managed to smash my passenger side wing mirror on Friday evening, we came home to find one of the fish trapped in the tank filter [it proceeded to die the following day], Fiancee accidentally doused the kitchen in soapy water after trying to clean the blender without putting the lid on, and upon pouring water from the kettle into a mug for a relaxing cup of tea to recover from all this, the mug cracked in half.
Things have not been going my way.
But on the bight side, walking in to find the kitchen and my fiancee covered in water was fairly amusing so I might have to count that on the other side of the tally. The blender was on the stop/start setting so it went off again after he thought he’d managed to switch it off.
Luckily, no Christmas decorations were harmed in the process.
Last night I managed to turn things around on the writing front somewhat. I’m finally getting over the stomach bug which struck mid-week and I wrote part three of Solitary Creatures : Monsters Love A Church.
‘Well we’re not dealing with Ancients just yet are we hmmm? We’re dealing with something that’s stirring up the Ancients and that’s a whole different kettle of fish because we both know how uppity those bastards are and let’s be honest, it doesn’t take that much to get them muttering in their sleep.’
‘It takes a massive natural disaster, like the one that killed the dinosaurs.’
‘We that’s a bit of an exaggeration if you ask me,’ Edwin shrugged. ‘They’ve made themselves known now and again in the meantime.’
‘There have only been four recorded incidents of the Ancients showing signs of waking,’ growled Sammy. ‘All of them have preceded death tolls that totalled in the millions. Whatever it is that’s got them uppity is bad news and that isn’t an exaggeration.’
Edwin tutted and shook his head. ‘Sammy, Sammy, Sammy. What will I do with you?’ …[Continued]
Unfortunately it looks like I’ve lost of the momentum that I built with the blog a few months ago and my daily stats are lucky to spike above twenty recently so despite getting down to some writing I’m aware that things are now how I want them to be. I need to get things back on track.
With 2017 just around the corner I’m starting to make plans for what I want to get done in the new year. January and February will be pretty much dedicated to finishing my AAT qualification but for the rest of the year I want my writing and blog to come first. That means using the next couple of weeks to line up some posts for those two months so focusing on my studies won’t turn Writing and Works into an abandoned husk with tumble weeds bouncing through the posts again.
Solitary Creatures looks like it will become a running series for 2017. I feel like it’s got more body to it than Headquarters and there is the opportunity to work some of my older flash fictions into it as I progress. I’m really looking forward to bringing back some works from a few years ago such as a piece of flash fiction from July 2014 called Mist.
“We don’t enjoy being summoned by your kind Grail.” Pulling herself from the mist Merida pressed her fingers to the rickety table-top of the patio furniture and leaned in. “We are not your servants,” she warned.
Grail lowered his morning coffee and pushed it away. It had turned cold the moment the mist crept into his garden. “Why do they always send you,” he frowned. “Is there no one else?”
“No one at all,” said Merida, scowling impatiently. “ The council is less than forgiving when it comes to your crimes.” … [Continued]
Aside from that there isn’t much to tell you this week.
Let me know what your plans are for the new year. Is it time for a revamp on your blog? Are you having another crack as last year’s resolutions? Will this be the year that you finally get on and write that blook/short story/play?
Let me know in the comments below.
Happy Holidays everyone.
Carol J Forrester 
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