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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