Tag / life

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.

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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

Half Faith – DVersePoets Haibun Monday

I was raised in stone built churches on country lanes. Visited four or five times a year, more often late than on time, flanked by my parents and sister. I prefer the old hymns to the new, the silence of reverence to the cries of praise from a congregation, and the arch of oak beams far above me, over the neat square faces of twentieth century municipal buildings thrown up in towns.

My Grandmother would say that God is always with her, no matter the place. When I told her I wasn’t sure I believed in him, she explained how he came to her whenever she was in need. How each time she opened herself to him, he was there. Even though she failed to seek him out when the storm clouds passed. I envied that faith when my own was a rickety boat threatening to drown me at sea.

Elizabeth The First is quoted as saying she did not want to make windows into men’s souls. I have to take sides with her about that. Poetry has a way of carving the essence out of you. Presenting it on a platter for the world to see. Something almost tangible in the way it tells you who you are. My faith is more like water. It runs through me like a stream, babbling in the background, but slipping through my fingers when I reach to grasp it. It is a part of me I still don’t know.

The air smells of rain.

I can feel it in my lungs

with each breath I take.

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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

Alight

We kicked the sheets to the foot of the bed

where they twisted like ropes,

caught us around our ankles,

legs already woven into each other,

pricked over in fresh sweat

that made their clinging embrace too much

for the fire under our skins.

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Tonight’s prompt for the DVerse Poets Quadrille night is fire! 

by Carol J Forrester

One Simple Gold Band

The nursing home had labeled it.

A thin strip of sticky white paper

folded over the band, pressed together,

with your name in neat, tiny letters

as if it was a reminder in itself

that the person who once owned it

could no longer claim it as their own

and had to be told ‘this is yours’

‘this is something precious to you’

‘this is part of who you were’.

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Tonight’s prompt was to write a poem based on a token such as those left by mothers for their children at the Foundling Hospital in London. Make sure to click the badge above and check out the other wonderful poems written by the fantastic poets taking part in tonight’s fun.