Tag / inspiration

by Carol J Forrester

Somewhere Between The Spoons

I found the words I was looking for

tucked away inside the attic,

between the nineteen-twenties bicycle pump

that might one day come in handy

and the vinyls we’d inherited

without anything to play them on.

 

I peeled them from their hiding place,

shook the dust loose

to gain a better look.

Decided to keep them for a rainy day,

and pressed their petals between the pages

of yet another notebook.

 

When the freezer broke

poems of you came flooding free.

I didn’t know

that was where I’d stored them.

Perhaps I’d been trying, much like always,

to keep them from going bad.

 

Sun-baked and burnt,

stories of another world

crawled across the decking like ants

in neat lines of black type,

each bearing the weight

of a word count five times their size.

 

Halfway through the washing

was the character I’d been waiting for.

Curled inside the flannel,

I almost felt guilty for shaking her free

when her elbows clacked against her knees

all limbs and adventures

tangled up as one.

 

One day, I worry,

all the hiding spots will run dry.

There will be no more words to find

no matter how much I may try

and the notepads will have only petals

where once there was ink

and the keyboard will sit silent

where once I could make it sing.

dverselogo

I decided to just see where tonight’s prompt took me for the dVerse Poets Pub’s Met The Bar Evening. I haven’t written a proper free write poem where I just spew words in a while so I thought I’d give it a go.

 

by Carol J Forrester

Snowdrops

There are snowdrops growing on the hill beneath your house.

I don’t think they’ve grown there before

or I would have seen them.

Felt their green stems bend beneath my back

as we tumbled one over the other

down the slopes free from winter covers at last,

bathed in the chill of spring days

which looked warmer than they were

when the curtains first peeled back those mornings

and our breath misted on the window panes.

 

You would have plucked them singularly

with the same precision you gave to cakes

on birthday celebrations,

determined everyone should receive the same.

My hands always tremble,

when asked to thread the eye of a needle

but yours would have slipped each stem

between the brambles of my hair

to build a crown of tiny buds,

pockets of white inside the calamity

that I would soon shake free.

 

When they ask me why I left

the roof of my mouth becomes fly paper.

The words stick and clot

until my jaw aches from the press

of things I don’t know how to say.

I’m sorry is somewhere among them,

and so are the excuses

that turn over each night beside me,

convinced they can make me believe

that they were something more

than simply fear.

 

 

 

 

by Carol J Forrester

Sunrise

Dawn broke like a bottle

and light fell as glass shards

through the sun bleached curtains

your mother bought for us

the month after we were married.

When they found the bed,

empty sheets burned gold,

the creases marked out in silver

an echo of our bodies

traced in the unmade,

and a slip of perfect pressed linen

still held taught

where I’d drawn a line

on the very last night

that I’d allowed you in

before shutting turning the locks

for good.

Title Prompt:Sunrise (courtesy of Nandina Varma)

I found the prompt for this poem on twitter and it fits quite nicely as I have another poem from a while back that was featured on the site Eyes & Words called Sunsets. It’s supposed to be a NaPoWriMo Day One prompt but I’ve already written one poem today, so it looks like this is a spare.

by Carol J Forrester

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

IMG_1745The 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 out a chapter by chapter breakdown of the plot and for once I haven’t got an ending that doesn’t feel much like an ending. If that doesn’t make much sense, then what I mean is the last part of previous drafts tended to feel like they just petered out. This time I think that I might have got it right. Of course I still need to get on and re-write the draft.

Aside from finishing my novel, this year’s writing goals include me trying to submit more entries into competitions. In the past I’ve entered one of two competitions a year, for 2018 I set myself the goal of entering at least three writing competitions. So far I’ve submitted to the following:

  • The 2017/2018 International Book & Pamphlet Competition
  • The Laureates Prize (Automatic entry for this is included with the above)
  • The Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize

Technically that hits the goal I set myself for the year, so I decided to move the finishing line. Seeing as we’re a quarter of the way through the year I thought it was only right that I multiply that goal by four. Instead of aiming to enter three competitions in 2018, I’m now aiming for twelve. I’ve got a month by month lists of the up-coming deadlines for writing competitions and I’m picking and choosing which ones I want to submit to. Two that I’m set on are the NYC Screen Writing Competition, and The Birdport Prize Novel Competition. Screen writing is not a completely new genre for me but it’s one that I’ve only dabbled in so the challenge should be a fun one. The novel competition will be just the first 5,000 words of my book but it’s a good motivator to get those 5,000 words to a place where I’m happy to show them to the world.

The end of March also brings the start of April and that means three things.

  • NaPoWriMologo-napowrimo
  • Camp NaNoWriMo
  • The A-Z Blogging Challenge

The next redraft of my book will include a lot of writing from scratch as I realized a lot of the current draft is fluff that will probably need cutting. The aim is to use Camp NaNoWriMo to get a rough draft of those chapters down on paper before the start of May so then my focus can really move to editing rather than writing.

National Poetry Writing Month is my favorite challenge of the year and in 2016 I smashed it! Last year not so much, so I need to prove to myself that I can do it again and it will also be a great challenge to get me writing lots of poetry that I can perhaps use for some of those competitions that I want to enter.

Lastly we have the A-Z Blogging Challenge, this is one that I’ve not before. I almost took part last year and then didn’t really write for the whole of April. I’m sure I can work the concept into my daily blogs though and it’s very much a community based challenge like NaPoWriMo and Camp NaNoWriMo which I love.

Blog Goals

Now a lot of my blog goals co-inside with my writing goals, and if you read this blog regularly you will have seen my 2018 goals listed in previous goals. So far I haven’t managed to hit any of them. I was doing quite well at the start of March, I’d picked myself up out of a slump and was posting pretty much every day. Then we hit mid-month and that fell out of sync.

Stats

As you can see from the stats above. I’ve not been very good about posting in the second half of March and that was something I told myself I was going tackle this year. I have to say though, my house looks fantastic! Two weeks of spring cleaning instead of writing has really got the place looking good.

However, back to the matter at hand. Getting onto a blogging schedule seems to be the problem for me, so the following goals are the ones that I want to have achieved by the middle of the year in the hopes of fixing that problem.

  1. Find a schedule that I can stick to with my blog with at least one piece of flash fiction a week, two/three pieces of poetry, and a chatty blog post about my writing outside of this blog.
  2. Increase my daily traffic so I can finally beat that ‘Best Ever’ view count from October 6th 2015. Yes that’s right, that view count is from almost three years ago and it’s simply laziness that’s kept me from getting close to it again.
  3. Write the second installment for the ‘Case One: The Missing Boy‘. This went up on March 11th and the aim is to write the sequel by April 11th. There have also been a few calls to write a follow up to ‘The Curse Of The Ex-Wife’ but that one is very much on the back-burner for now.

 

So, that’s it for the first quarter of the year. You’ve seen my triumphs and my failures so far in and hopefully I’ve given you a little encouragement to have a look at what you want for yourself this year and achieve it. Let me know in the comments below what you’re aiming for this year and if you’ve managed to achieve any of those goals yet? Perhaps you have some advice for me on keeping up with a blogging schedule, or perhaps you just fancy a chat. Either way, you know where that comment section is and I can’t wait to hear from you.

Thanks for reading and happy writing.

by Carol J Forrester

Tanaga – Betrayed

Tongue tied behind your pearl teeth,

I plucked roses from the wreath

of flowers wrapped round my arms

now wilted much like your charms.

dverselogo

Tonight I’m combining the Daily Post Prompt Betrayed and dVerse Thursday night ‘Meet The Bar’ prompt to write a Tanaga.

A Tanaga is a poem with four lines per stanza, and seven syllables per line. This is my attempt at writing a short Tanaga to get myself back in the poetry mood before April arrives with all the madness of NaPoWriMo.