Tag / life

by Carol J Forrester

A Stutter In Seasons

I’ve started to feel like the garden pond. All inky darkness and sheet glass front, spiked in hoarfrost but more vicious than beautiful. Instead of budding, unfolding into spring, I’m sitting silent. Even the pigeons hesitate by my edge, pressing tentative toes to the surface, unsure of my stability. When the temperatures rise, I stay frozen.

Inside winter had no time to settle. The dining room is full of green, from the fig tree to the pepper bush, in the corner a lemon shrub. A rose I bought two years ago is late to bloom though. It grows but all it gives are leaves which turn to brittle crunch in the dustpan. I am starting to give up hope that I will see any flowers.

I know spring will come,

I know this winter will end.

I must learn to wait.

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I feel I might have missed the mark with my response to tonight Haibun Challenge. It’s not so much a budding poem as a frozen one, but with the recent weather in England it hasn’t felt very much like spring I’m afraid.

by Carol J Forrester

Peaceful

Sleep drunk you curl into me,

mutter half a sentence,

and slip away again.

These mornings,

where the sun sneaks in

past the darkness of the blinds

to trip across the covers

in soft waterfalls of light

I latch my legs into yours,

find a rib to cling to,

tuck my head into the hollow

beneath chest and chin

and let myself breath

slowly.

unworried by the tussle of hair,

rumple of sheets,

tangle of chores waiting downstairs,

I lie here with you.

Daily Prompt: Messy

 

by Carol J Forrester

Right, Time To Get Things Moving Around Here #WeekendCoffeeShare

So it’s been a while since I wrote a chatty, update post. So long in fact that the original ‘If We Were Having Coffee’ seems to have fizzled into non-existence. But anyway, what have I been up to since August.

Well I’m still working on Shadow Dawn. The draft is now past the 70,000 words mark and I’ve had to go back to the start as I feel like I’ve completely lost track of what I intended to do with the book when I started writing it. On the plus side, I reread a chapter from about half way through and didn’t hate it so there might be hope for this story yet. IMG_0966

For the past week I’ve managed to churn out more poetry than I have done over the last three months. If you follow the site you’ve probably noticed the upturn in the activity and I’m trying to keep things that way. I’ve started posting more flash fiction based on writing prompts from Story Shack and I’m trying to put up something for most, if not all of the Daily Prompts. Part of this is to do with trying to get into a routine of sitting down and writing each evening when I get home. If it becomes habit then I have no excuse for not finishing Shadow Dawn or for leaving this blog untouched for three/four months at a time.

Speaking of poetry, NaPoWriMo and Camp NaNoWriMo are just around the corner. In 2016 I managed to complete NaPoWriMo, but last year I didn’t even manage to complete the first day. For 2018 I’m hoping to not only finish NaPoWriMo but to also hit a few other poetry goals. So far I’ve not been doing too bad. In January I entered my first Poetry Slam, I didn’t get past the first round but I had a lot of fun and got some fantastic feedback from the other poets competing. In February I entered The International Book and Pamphlet Competition hosted by The Poetry Business. This will be the first of the six competitions I’ve challenged myself to submit to this year. I don’t know if I’ll manage to get anywhere with any of them but I won’t know if I don’t try.

As I’m now re-working Shadow Dawn more than writing from scratch, I also want to get back to my Headquarters series, and more specifically the Safe Haven branch that I started writing a couple of years ago. Since I’m also studying for my Level 3 AAT accountancy qualification my target is one update a month for the series. That might become two for March as the first update will be the redraft of part one.

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Unfortunately I’m not looking to have any Guest Posts this year. I’ve done them in the past and while they are a great way of getting to know fellow bloggers, they take a huge amount of organizing. Finding willing participants is also difficult and time consuming. I am going to try a link-up series in April for fellow NaPoWriMo participants but that will be once a week and be incorporated into a weekly update post about how the challenge is going.

However, I am looking for fellow bloggers who are willing to share their poems and thought this Thursday as part of International Women’s Day. A week or so ago I posted a piece called Legs Eleven about the pressures of people judging you based on how you dress. This Thursday I want to put up a post for anyone to comment on and link to that looks at the biggest challenge they feel they have had to face as a woman, either in life or in the last year. If this is something you’d like to get involved with then you can email me at caroljforrester@hotmail.com.

Finally, I’ve also started experimenting with audio recordings of my poems. I added one to today’s poem When The Words Fall Out and I’ve also done one for my piece Legs Eleven which is included below. Let me know what you think in the comments below. I’ve tried recording videos of poems before but never liked watching myself very much so this seemed like a nice in between. Do you think they work or is it better to leave to poems as they are and let the readers just read them.

by Carol J Forrester

When The Words Fall Out

The words are out before I can catch them,

dropped like stones in a pond

they create waves the second they land

and sink too deep for me to fish them out.

I cannot return them to my mouth

where they should have stayed,

where my teeth should have acted like prison bars,

keeping the rabble locked away

out of sight and out of mind,

so you wouldn’t see the mess

I’ve been sweeping beneath the carpet

every time you come to visit.

Like every loud and sudden noise,

they inspire silence in their wake.

A look of confusion as you reach for them.

You turn them over in the light

only to find you can’t identify

what it is I’ve let slip of.

Instead you dust off your hands

so the stones turn to petals and crumble.

It is almost like I never said them at all.

Daily Prompt: Messy

 

by Carol J Forrester

Finding Focus – #WeekendCoffeeShare

If we were having coffee, well first of all I’d have to offer an apology, this weekend seems to have gotten away from me. Sunday evening has crept up and before I really understood what was happening, the weekend is pretty much over. However, I feel like I’m ending on a positive note.

On Saturday I ordered a copy of Stephen King’s book The Gunslinger and today it arrived. I was surprised by how thin it was, curiosity led me to google, and I went in search of the exact word count of the book. Turns out that it only just breeches the 60,000 word mark.

Now, for the past six months I’ve been worry about the length of my book. The bulk of the fantasy novels that I own stretch into the 200,000 to 300,000 word mark and I was concerned that Shadow Dawn wouldn’t be a long enough book. However, it’s already longer than ‘The Gunslinger’ and I think I might be putting too much focus on word counts and chapter lengths. I already know that Shadow Dawn will be book one in a series, so instead of trying to cram in all the plot points I’ve listed down for this draft, I think I’m going to go back and narrow down the list. This will shift the focus of the book but in the end I think it will make it a better read and tighten up the plot.

There are seventeen days left in August and my hope is that if I get my head down and focus, I can have a rough draft of the remaining chapters done by the first of October. Then it will be a matter of going through the first 60,000 words and trimming out the chaff. I was going to try and finished this draft by the end of August but I can’t see a way of doing that without literally sacrificing all my free time to it and at the moment I’m pretty happy with the blogging routine I seem to be getting into.

This week I managed to publish my second post in a series that I launched in anticipation of my seventh blogging anniversary in October. The first was Seven Top Tips of Blogging and the second is How To Create A Blogging Schedule [working off what has and, perhaps more significantly, wasn’t hasn’t worked for me in the past.] Next week I’m planning a piece on guest posts and hosting guest posts on your site. The series is a little different from what I normally do but I’m really enjoying writing it and I’m reminding myself of some pretty useful things as well.

This week I also published two other posts a little outside the norm for this blog. One of which was on gender stereotypes. I had hoped it would spark some conversation but it didn’t seem to have gain much traction. The other was a piece where I went over an old poem and tried to workshop it in a blog post. I’m not sure it worked but it was an interesting challenge for myself. I’ll leave a couple of links below for anyone who’s interested.

What Are Little Girls Are Made Of?: Breaking The Stereotypes In My Head 

Confusion: How To Rewrite An Old Poem #ThrowbackThursday

As with every week, I’d love to know how you’ve all been. Do let me know how the week has gone with you in the comments below. If I don’t see you there, then until next week, here’s wishing you all the best. Happy reading and writing.