Almost indistinct,
her watermark.
Yet when I looked
beneath your words
I saw only her
instead of you.
Tag / Blog
#WeekendCoffeeShare – Submissions, Publications And Getting On With It
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 these submissions I’ve continued posting poems and stories to Writing and Works. My poem ‘Man Up And Carry On‘ sparked some fantastic discussion in the comments section which I really enjoyed reading. It also had me thinking about a blog post I read about ‘What Makes A Blog Post Successful‘, is it the views, the likes, or the comments. How do we judge ‘success’ in blogging. For me I would say my most successful posts are the ones like ‘Man Up And Carry On’ as they generate interaction not only between myself and readers, but between the readers themselves. As a writer, one of your goals is to make the reader think about the things you’re writing about, you want them to take something away and mull it over. When you can see a comment thread continuing two, or three days later, you know that you have achieved this.
One of the submissions that I sent off today was my entry for the Bath Flash Fiction Award. Since I submitted on the last day of the window I got a lovely email telling me that I qualified for their ‘Last Minute Club’ badge. I didn’t intend to be quite so last minute about it but this week ended up being far busier and far more tiring than I expected so there was a bit of a mad dash today to finalize my redraft and to get it in. I managed it though and I can now say that I met my target of submitting an entry to a competition that I’ve been meaning to get around to since last year’s competition.
For the rest of February I’ll be doing much the same as I’ve been doing for January, just without the bout of lurgy at the end of the month hopefully. I want to add at least one more poem to my collection draft, submit to a couple more journals, start and finish chapter two for my novel re-write (I finally completed chapter one last weekend), and get on with studying for the next module in my AAT qualifications. I won’t have the results for my first two exams until March but I can keep going with the next three modules while I wait.
I will also be preforming one poem at a local arts event next Saturday and I’ve been invited to perform a five minute slot at the Shrewsbury Poetry Night in April so I seem to be getting back into the swing of live readings which I’m very happy about.
For those of you out there reading this, how has 2019 gone so far for you? Are you keeping on top of those resolutions and goals, or have you found that they’ve changed as the year got underway? More importantly, have you managed to achieve something that brings you joy? It can be small or big, what matters is that it makes you smile when you tell someone about it. Take a moment to revel in your victories. Until next time, thanks for reading and all the best for February. I hope you find a way to make this month your own.
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Wool-Gathering At The Field’s Edge
She makes babies clothes for the sleeping children.
Started with her own, but just kept going…
That’s why she walks the fence line.
Knuckle bones pressed white against paper skin.
Twisting wool loose.
Gathering the lost.
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Against All The Signs
I stopped believing in harbingers,
the same way I try not to flinch
when passing on the stairs,
or hide the sidestep in my walk
for cracks on the pavement.
Superstition crawled inside my head
before I was old enough to name it.
Caught up between pie crusts
my great-grandmother baked,
hidden in the coils
of her apple peels.
Good Day Mr Magpie,
are you well? How’s the family?
We buried glass somewhere,
years ago,
when it broke like ice
and my mother feared
the things she’d been taught
might just come true.
Seven years bad luck
unless it’s buried.
Deeper now, deeper,
hide the evidence and the thought.
Sometimes it’s simpler not to
see the shadows casts as signs.
Yet I still count in threes,
for these things always come in threes.
Crossed knives,
tempest in a teapot,
do not stir and do not pour
these quarrelsome ideas.
The worst of it always comes unseen.
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#WeekendCoffeeShare -Happy Poems Are Still Not My Thing
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.
Thanks for reading. Make sure to check out the host of this wonderful weekly blog event Eclectic Ali and the other bloggers who join in to share their stories. You can find them by clicking the badge above.
Carol J Forrester 
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