Monthly Archives: September 2020

Friday

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My attachment to minimalistic titles continues.

My tendency to ramble and procrastinate is also well to the fore today. I have started this post twice, done some thinking for two other posts, which may never see the light of day and I have drunk deep from the well of clichés. Sometimes only a well-worn and hackneyed phrase will do.

I’ve just noticed that the evening has almost gone. I have been so busy snoozing and eating our traditional Friday night supper of fish and chips that six hours of my life have just melted away.

Last night, after posting, I settled down to examine a couple of magazines I am thinking of submitting to. One features the more experimental end of the haiku spectrum. I think I’m going to leave that alone at the moment as I’m not feeling particularly cutting edge or experimental. Haiku are hard enough without having to mess about with them.

The other magazine I was looking at tends to be a bit the other way. I spent a couple of hours trying to expand existing haibun to fit the lengthy, multi-haiku approach they favour, and it didn’t work. I then tried writing one from scratch. That didn’t work either.

This is both good and bad news. I have obviously developed a style I am comfortable with, which is good. I have obviously also become too comfortable with it, which is bad. There’s a fine line between developing a style and becoming a one trick pony.

It looks like I may be developing an artistic temperament. I’ll have to do something about knocking that out of me.

On a lighter note, I sat down to write a magazine article last night. Three hundred and fifty words later I finished. That is very short for a magazine article. In fact it’s far too short. It is, however, my typical blog length. It looks like blogging has helped me write regularly, but has developed a habit of writing in 250-350 word chunks. This piece, for instance, will be  three hundred and forty nine words when it is finished.

Glasses from Amazon

Thursday

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I must say I’m finding the titling of the posts a lot easier this week, though I’m not sure what to do next week. I might insert “Another” into the title, or “Next”. That will see me through another seven days. However, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

One of the computers is working again in the shop. It seems it’s a well known quirk of that computer and often occurs after automatic updates. You cure it by repeatedly pressing f11 as soon as a message appears on the screen.

When I say “well known” I mean well known to one of us. If the rest of us had known we would have fixed it. Communication is important in business but is often ignored.

I have a haibun out in Failed Haiku. You will have to scroll down to find Simon Wilson, though there are a lot of good things to read on the way down. The submission requirement this month was that the prose portion of the haibun should be fifty words or less.

If you want to know more about Southwold Pier (that’s what the haibun is about) try this post, or this post. Actually, now I check those two, you also need this one. The haibun is a bit pretentious and, if you like to know these things, actually relates to two different visits – the rude woman visit from several years ago and the visit the week before lockdown, where everyone had fled to their holiday homes to sit out the plague.

The pictures feature my new glasses. The featured image is the box with four pairs remaining.  The other image which I am going to title “Study Number 1” is me in Serengeti mode, with my zebra mask and zebra glasses, though they look more than slightly polka dot to me.  The general impression of a village idiot with a camera is enhanced by my self-inflicted lockdown haircut and the suspicion of Old Testament which hangs around my beard.

Now, what can I call tomorrow’s post?

Study Number 1 - The Idiot

Study Number 1 – The Idiot

Wednesday (Reprise)

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As I’m becoming more successful as a poet I have decided I need to start using bigger words, so there’s no more (Part 2) for me.

Although, there are signs that all is not well in the land of art and poetry.

First of all we have imposter syndrome. This is the nagging feeling at the back of your mind that things aren’t quite right and you are going to get found out. It’s all very well getting a few bits published, but what happens if someone asks you a question using a Japanese word you don’t understand?

This could easily happen because apart from sayonara, banzai and sushi I don’t tend to recognise many Japanese words. I know there are words to do with punctuation, the seasons and a sense of loss, which are all used in writing haibun, but I couldn’t actually tell you which was which if you asked me.

The main problem is that I don’t actually know how I do it. I just sit down with a pen and paper (it has to be a pen and paper, I can’t generally manage to do it on the computer). This is one of those strange things – I can blog on the computer and I can do articles on the computer, but haibun, haiku and poems need pen and paper.  Not only that but a fountain pen is better than a biro. I’m not sure why, that’s just how it is.

I think part of it is that the computer gives me more ability to correct things, which leads to me correcting more than I actually write.

Second – I’ve just had my fastest ever rejection. One of my submissions has been out for six weeks. If they run true to form the magazine will be in touch soon with a gentle rejection. I’m expecting that.

What I wasn’t expecting was one of the others from yesterday to reject me inside 24 hours. You can’t complain about the speed of editors these days – three submissions yesterday and I already have one acceptance and one rejection.

The difference is that the acceptance sparks up the worries about being found to be a fraud. The swift rejection tends to reinforce this. Not only did they not like it, but there was so little merit in it that they had to get it off the premises as soon as possible before it turned any other submissions bad.

If I’d sent it in on the last few days of the submission window I could have said that it came back so quickly because they were full. But when you send it in on the first day and get it back on the second day of the submission window you can feel fairly certain that they didn’t like it.

I suppose you can’t expect too much, as the next acceptance will be my 13th Japanese style poem to be accepted. If it ever is. Assuming that I can’t bring the mood down with imposter syndrome I may as well use superstition.

 

Wednesday

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First exciting fact of the day – I’ve discovered a new system for selecting titles for post. It will only last a week before I run into trouble, but it will be good while it lasts. At my age anything that helps to reduce mental wear and tear has got to be good.

Second – I just had my order of reading glasses from Amazon. They aren’t quite like I pictured them from the advertisement, and the spotted front isn’t exactly what I’d expected from glasses marked as “zebra”. I’m going to look like a 1980s advertising executive but for £2 a pair I can put up with that. They are a good size too, as many cheap sets are a bit tight on my big head, which is why they break.

Third, I remembered some of the Monday things I talked about in the Tuesday post before they were lost. I dropped my camera on my big toe (painful blood blister), ordered reading glasses on line for the first time (see point 2) and bought Julia a set of glasses with LED lights to help her with the adult painting-by-numbers kits I bought her to while away the lockdown. She has trouble seeing the tiny, pale grey numbers. So do I, we ended up using a torch and my eyeglass last time we had trouble, hence the sci-fi specs.

The facts have become steadily less exciting as I have gone along, so here’s a better one.

Four, I just had my third acceptance in three weeks. If your computer has a smugness alarm it will probably be sounding any minute…

It’s the first time I’ve ever had three pieces of work queued up awaiting publication. It’s probably linked to the fact that it’s the first time I’ve sent out nine submissions in six weeks.

With this one I had to agree to remove one of the two haiku that was in it and make it all into one paragraph. As I’d only just stuck the second haiku in as part of my last minute tinkering I wasn’t that bothered at removing it.

As for the single paragraph thing, I’ve had that before. Haibun editors don’t like white space and single line paragraphs.

I don’t mind them.

I think they make things easier to read, and add emphasis.

But if an editor suggests something it always seems sensible to accomodate them. They have much more experience than I do, and it’s foolish not to accept the help.

I’m now waiting for answers from several editors who have rejected me in the past. I’m hoping that I’ve improved since last time, but who can tell.

I’m going for the writing picture at the top again, because it’s too annoying to bother with much else at the moment. I have some decluttering waiting, and after that I need to do the online shopping.

 

 

Tuesday

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It’s Tuesday and it’s one of my days off under or new shop routine.

I have dropped Julia at work and was back home shortly after 9.00 to start a day of creativity. First I started the computer, then restarted it when the keyboard and then the cursor refused to work. It sometimes happens when a connection shakes lose at the back of the computer but I’ve not had it happen like this before. The sign of things to come?

I have also read and replied to the comments that were waiting for me on the blog and checked my emails.

I the pottered about, wrote a six hundred word post, which included news of our bucket grown orchard – or the damson and apple tree if you want to be accurate.

I spoke of various other things, which I now can’t call to mind, and added the following paragraph.

Having set my alarms for the afternoon I am now settling down to five and a half hours of creativity.

At that point I failed to load photos so went away and came back to write the next paragraph and load damsons. As I posted and read the finished article, I thought it seemed a bit short. It is. I’ve lost 300 words. These machines hate me. They aren’t in the drafts, so I don’t know what’s happened. I am, to be frank, miffed.

However, it’s an irritation rather than tragedy and I’m not going to let it ruin my day. It’s just the electronic manifestation of the Person from Porlock.

I then went on to say this – I couldn’t get the photos to load last time so left it a while. It’s now time for lunch and all my creativity can be summed up as “final editing before submitting”. In other words a few spaces have been altered, a few words subtracted or added, a haiku tinkered with and a lot of tooth sucking has gone on.

Then I said to myself – they’re just poems, get them sent.

So I did.

Now I’m going to try the pictures of damsons again.

Sorry about the way it chops round, but I needed to add a bit for the sake of continuity after trying to make good some of the loss of words.

Damsons from the garden