Category Archives: writing

Reading About Myself in Google

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Robin

I’ve just been checking myself on Google. It’s not a pursuit for the faint-hearted or the modest.

I am, it seems,  a prominent British haibun poet and my work is frequently published in leading haiku and haibun journals where it is a regular fixture in journals like Contemporary Haibun Online, Drifting Sands Haibun, and the Wales Haiku Journal. Another entry records that I am a contemporary writer known for my haibun, often featured in journals like Contemporary Haibun Online, where my works explore everyday observations, life changes, and poignant reflections on subjects like old mills, cormorants, funerals, and war-torn landscapes, showcasing my keen eye for detail and emotional depth within short, evocative pieces. 

It then cites a  Guardian article about me and has a line that says “AI responses may include mistakes”

They are not wrong about that.

Robin

The Simon Wilson in the Guardian is younger than me, better groomed, more successful and, above all, Australian.

There are many Simon Wilsons spread around the place, including several who are poets or journalists, so there is plenty of room for confusion. However, much of what they say is factually accurate even though it has been fashioned into something capable of giving a misleading picture of me and my work. “Prominent” and “fixture” are both pushing the boundaries of accuracy, to be fair, and some of the other stuff is rather flattering too. However it’s nice to see AI in action. I am now aware that it has been programmed to add a veneer of sophistication and success to our achievements and, as such will definitely be taking over the world. It’s easy to resist an evil genius, but far harder to be cynical about flattery. Who doesn’t like to be described as “prominent” and “a regular fixture”? I can already feel myself beginning to admire AI for its good taste.

Robin in the Garden Centre cafe

 

 

 

The Mystery of Editors and Some Thoughts on Writer’s Block

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

 

I had my first acceptance from the July submissions on Monday. It was a tanka that had actually been rejected in June, but after a quick check I decided that it was ready to go again.  It was part of a group of nine that had been returned after the tenth was accepted, so I only needed to write one to make the submission up to ten.

It’s one of the age-old questions writers have. I send out ten poems, one is accepted, does that mean the other nine are not good enough?

Sometimes I’ve had an editor ask if they can hold one over for the next edition. I always say yes to that – it saves me work and I assume it saves them work too. If it wasn’t for editors there wouldn’t be any magazines. And if there were no editors and magazines there would be no competition for publication. That’s why I mainly only blog poems that have been published – it means that someone who knows more about it than I do has decided that it merits space.

I’ve also had editors select two or three poems (very, very rarely) and a couple of times they have told me the rest weren’t bad, just not what they wanted for the moment, and I could submit them again at the next submission window. This is very rare – remember we are talking about something in the region of 400 submissions and this sort of thing has happened a handful of times.

Photo by Burst on Pexels.com

It all tends to indicate that several of the ten are publishable, and that they can all be recycled. That’s why I like editors who give quick decisions. If they reject something in the first few weeks, I can use them for another submissions and don’t need to write as much.

This may be a bad attitude, and more akin to the approach of a  worker on a production line than an artist but  this month I’ve just had an article on collectables published in a magazine, plus four Facebook articles for the Numismatic Society of Nottinghamshire and  a couple of longer articles  for the Peterborough Military History Group. If I waited for aesthetics and inspiration to align I’d struggle. Dawn comes, I drag myself from bed, I make tea, then I start writing. I hate mornings. I like tea and I like writing. I have no time for Writer’s Block and curlicues. And I’m more likely to suffer from dehydration than a shortage of words. I have no time for the introspection in the article behind the link. It’s very interesting, and more than slightly familiar, but I can’t afford to let such thoughts take root.

Photo by Roman Koval on Pexels.com

 

Struggling Still with Time

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Buzzard

I had another acceptance. I’m now about to enter a lean streak with just three editors to reply – one I’ve never submitted to before, one is a new editor with a magazine that normally turns me down and the third is a guest editor in a magazine with which I have mixed results. And that final one is the one I submitted as the only submission of this month. With everyone cutting back on frequency of publication, and with them all operating on different schedules this sometimes happens. A few years ago there were several who published every month but both of them have now gone to publishing just six issues a year.

I now have more poetry to write, so I had a quick image search for Crowland Abbey. It’s been an interesting subject over the years, and I just wanted to look at some photos for ideas. I found a great picture, and a quote I recognised from John Clare’s sonnet about the abbey – Wrecks of Ornamented Stones. It’s a good quote and, I thought regretfully, a shame that someone had already used it.

Donkey watching . . .

Then I looked harder. It seems I’m being immodest in calling it a great picture, as it’s one of mine, and it was me who already used the title. Sometimes I’m just so prolific I forget what I’ve written. February 2017. We’ve seen a few changes since then. Like the old abbey I am “struggling still with time”.

Having appropriated another line of Clare’s poem I am now going back to my previous (pre-Crowland search) activity – reading tanka and stealing ideas to help me write poems of my own. That’s the T S Eliot method isn’t it?

“Good poets borrow, great poets steal.”

Captain Cook and a seagull

Unfortunately, as usual, it seems to be a misattribution. What he actually said was  “mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” I know that because I just lifted it from another blog. I could research it myself, but it was easier just to cut and paste and then post a link.

It’s pretty much the same, it’s just that the second quote is far too complicated. I look through a poem and extract something that sets me going. It’s not plagiarism, or outright theft, it’s seeking inspiration and understanding. Think of an opal miner. They take a stone from the depths of the earth, and give it a wash. It’s a thing of beauty in its own right. Then a stone cutter cuts and polishes. Still a thing of beauty, but different, as it is after a jeweller has set it.  Theft is probably not the right word, it’s just a well-travelled idea, and I’m about to take a few of them on a new journey.

Wren

 

Work in (Slow) Progress

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Progress so far is that I’ve found 16 haibun/tanka prose that are close to completion and have worked on six of them to improve them. I’m going to work my way through the rest now, but will have to get a move on as I’m not going fast enough.

Nine days to go, and a lot still to be done.

The good news is that I only need six good ones, as editors only usually accept one at a time. It helps to have three good ones as you never quite know what is going to be flavour of the month. There are also some that have been out before and I need to make sure they don’t go back to the same places.

Slightly less good news – I still need to get 24 good tanka and haiku written and I’m nowhere near finding inspiration for that.

I’ve managed to reduce the production of the prose poems to a fairly industrial process – write the prose (which is generally fairly simple), add the poem (not quite so simple), edit, send out, edit again, and repeat . . .

It’s easy enough to stack the prose sections up, and even to edit and re-edit. When in need of a poem that won’t come it’s also possible to take one from somewhere else. I also move chunks of prose from one to another, a bit like working in a breaker’s yard. This is the perspiration stage of the stage. The inspiration bit it trickier and easily derailed by tea and biscuits, visitors or writing about medallions.

So many distractions, so little time.

Tonight’s task is to revise four more prose sections and write some acceptable tanka. I have no distractions now so I’m hoping to rattle along. We have to stay over in Nottingham for a few days so I need to increase my speed to allow for days away. My aim – write faster and write quicker. With practice, the quality will come.

Orange Parker Pen

 

Quick Progress

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After writing that I had no submission plan for the coming year, I thought I had better get on with it. It seems I have quite a lot to do. There are 13 possible submissions to 9 different editors at five magazines, plus three possible competition entries.

They require 57 poems to make their selections. I have little prepared and just 12 days to do it in. I should really be writing poetry now, not blogging. Or thinking about breakfast. Mainly, I must admit, I am thinking about breakfast.

Last night I wrote ten tanka before bed. I have rewritten four of them and they are enough for two of the submissions (one editor requires three to select from, the other wants a single poem). I will let them stew for a few days, as it’s always good to go back with fresh eyes, but at least I have two of the thirteen done.

It is also possible that I won’t waste my money on the haiku competition, so that’s three done. It’s beginning to look a lot more manageable.

Now (having finished breakfast) I am going to set to and write the remaining 23 tanka. They will be reshaped by the time they are submitted but getting them all done will be a weight off my mind. After that I am going to sift through the pixelated pile of rejects and half-started prose poetry. There must be a few things in there that I can recycle. And that means that by this evening I will be  starting to write more poetry because I will be forced into it. Inspiration comes in many forms and has many names.

 

The Pitfalls of Contentment

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Although I have a lot to look forward to and a lot to be grateful for – a new house, someone paying me not to work (or a pension as it is also known) and the ability to see Julia all day rather than just for a rushed breakfast and an evening of preparing for the next day, I am at a low ebb in other ways.

I am, for instance, just days away from the end of several submission windows, with nothing ready and, currently, no interest in writing poetry. It’s actually worse than it sounds, because I haven’t even done my list of planned submissions for the year. I’m sure it was only about a month since I said I was going to aim higher this year. So far I have done nothing.

Contentment, it seems, takes its toll.

My Orange Parker Pen

My plan is to improve by writing more. And to write more I have to submit more, because it doesn’t count as writing unless somebody judges it. For instance – my first paragraph uncoiled as one sentence. And that sentence is 65 words. Now, it’s well known that sentences over 30 words are difficult for most people to understand, the British Government style guide specifies a 25 word maximum and many authorities on writing suggest 15-20 words as being ideal, though James Joyce, who was probably a better writer than most Civil Servants, once wrote a sentence that was 4,391 words long (I knew I had a good reason for avoiding Joyce), so it’s fair to suggest that one of the benefits of submitting writing to editors is that they will curb these tendencies (though note how J K Rowling’s books got longer as she became more successful and no editor dared tell her to cut out half the words). I think that was 113   I am a mere amateur compared to Joyce. But you probably already knew that.

I’ve been getting complacent recently – submitting pieces for the Numismatic Society Facebook page does not involve a lot of competition as there are only two of us writing the posts, and that fell to one for a while over Christmas because the other writer was ill.

Time to start testing myself, I think. The only way to improve is to get a few rejections. That will wake me up.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

 

Words

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Cottage loaves – various staes of success

I wrote two posts after the last one was published, and filed them both. One was about the growing corruption in the world and the UK’s slide down to 20th position in the league tables. The other was about writing poetry. One was boring and the other was boring and self-indulgent.

They ended up around 400 words each and the only thing worth preserving is that out of my last four submissions I have had three poems accepted. I have not heard back from the fourth.

That’s over 800 words I wrote for no real purpose. It’s nice to know I can knock out 800 words without a problem, less nice to know that it does me little good. I really should divert all those words into something useful.

Apple juice

I could write begging letters. I imagine that most of them will be unsuccessful but it’s a thought. I did once, when I was young and enthusiastic, write some letters to newspapers that paid for letters, and did get several cheques. However, it was difficult striking just the right note (a topic of interest balanced with the right degree of outrage) and I soon moved on to doing filler pieces for a magazine that took interesting facts and scattered them in little boxes throughout the text. I can’t quite remember what happened to them – some editorial change that meant they weren’t needed. After that I tried full length articles and short stories but it’s a lot of work for little success in a crowded market, and I had kids by then.

That’s probably the best thing about kids – an instant excuse for everything I didn’t quite do. However, it’s noticeable that my two successful periods of writing poetry fall either side of the kids taking all my time.

I rest my case.

Making cider vinegar

 

Pictures are from October 2015.

 

 

It is Done

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The Magpie, Little Stonham, Suffolk

I stuck to the rules and I have three new poems to show for it. I felt like I’d had enough after two, but three is the target. Either three revised or three composed. Being inflexible, and having started to write, I carried on writing, even if the rules would have allowed me to write two and revise one.

Silly as it may sound (I am, after all, talking about writing poetry, not cleaning out a hen house) I am now in need of a rest. This blog post is a rest. Just a change of pace.

Yesterday I deviated from the rules, and things went wrong. The gardeners arrived and did their job. I went out to avoid the first three hours then returned, made cups of tea for us all and got to work. I couldn’t think of poetry so I got stuck into an article I am writing – fact checking and constructing a biography from snippets. It’s coming together slowly. Very slowly.  However, it did fill the day so although I veered off track, I did at least spend several hours in useful pursuits.

Norfolk Flint Wall

Flexibility, as TP just remarked, is key. The rules and targets are to make me work with more focus. If I can fill a few hours with effort instead of frittering my time away all day, it is time well spent and proof that a few rules and targets can help.

I have set targets before, for junior sports clubs and for writing and in all cases I have achieved much more when I plan and write it down. The trick is to make sure you sit down and write something out. I’ve let things drift for the last three years and although some good things have happened, I have to say that more would have happened if I had planned.

I use the SMART model – that’s Specific, Measurable,, Something, Something and Time-bound or Timely (they struggle a bit with that last one). I always have to look it up because I can’t remember the middle bit.  It’s Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Doesn’t really nee a title does it?

I will end up with a table that has magazine names with times and targets in boxes. It fits quite well. The names are Specific, the targets are Measurable because they are numbers of poems, the targets are Achievable, but I don’t actually need a column for that, Relevant is the type of poetry (they don’t all take the same sort of thing) and Time-bound is a good column for the submission windows, though I generally rely on my submissions calendar for that. There’s a lot more admin in writing poetry than the lives of Lord Byron or Dylan Thomas would suggest.

Pictures are from September 2018, a trip round East Anglia.

The contents of the bag

My Theory of Timing Submissions

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REsettling the plough

As it turned out, yesterday’s grand plan ground to a halt. With just sixteen days until the end of the month I need to start looking at haibun and tanka prose. I have, as usual, plenty of prose sections, but finding the right words for the haiku and tanka can be tricky. I have just about got enough for four submissions but |I need to get on with it as the final few short lines can end up taking a long time.

Just as I thought it was all coming back the hard facts indicate that I don’t have enough poems, and the ones I have, aren’t far enough advanced. There was a time when I used to have all my submissions queued up at the end of a month, waiting like caged greyhounds to hit the ground running as the new month  My theory was that if I was borderline but got in first, the later poems would have to be better than me to displace me and just being equally good would not be enough. Better, I thought, to be the first poem about getting old than the second, third or fourth. Poets are notorious for churning over the same few subjects, so if you can’t be original, or best, try being first.

Detail of the mouse

Now, as my energy declines, I find it hard enough just to scrape a few poems together by the end of the month. There is an advantage to this – the decisions seem to be faster and you have the rejects back in time to use them again in a timely manner. Using this system I have sometimes had a decision within hours, and the poems have been out again in a similar time span. I once had a poem that was rejected, submitted elsewhere and accepted within a space of days.

However, as things stand, I need twelve poems of usable quality. Time moves on, and those twelve are now my priority. The great recycling project will have to wait. editors often remark on the number of submissions they receive, but it’s also true that there are more editors out there than I can submit to. I just can’t write fast enough. October is a month with no haibun submissions planned, so the recycling can start then, as can the production of the next batch of haibun.

Two sizes of wheatsheaf loaf

Pictures are from September 2016 this time.

Sixteen Swimming Swans

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Mute Swan – Rufford Abbey

This morning I thought of several poems whilst I was on the way back from dropping Julia off. This is the same time frame where I used to have all my best ideas. My brain is awake but the task of driving on a fairly clear road is not too demanding. At that point thoughts come into my head. I actually had my first idea before we left home, had a second as I dropped her off and had several more on the way home. No pad, no voice recorder, just me repeating things to myself.

When I reached home I noted the ideas down and wrote the prose sections for five haibun. That’s more than I did in the last months – the ones I’ve submitted have all been written for ages and I have merely worked my way through them without originating anything. They have had a few tweaks, and have needed a haiku or a tanka here and there, but generally all my recent acceptances have been written for months. That, of course, is how it is supposed to be. People who know these things advise leaving work to mature.

Mute Swan at Clumber Park

I just looked back and realise that I have had three months this year when I have submitted nothing and that everything I have had accepted since March has been, and been rejected, at least once.

Since this morning I have had two more ideas, though I have not settled to write them yet. Even poets have to wash up and drink tea. One of the ideas is actually about drinking tea.

Swan at National Arboretum

If you’ve ever followed my creative process you will have noticed that things change and I’m more of an artisan than an artist. I don’t really have a creative process, despite what I just wrote. In three months it’s quite likely that the reflections on drinking tea will have become a poem about eating sandwiches. That’s how it goes. That’s how my poem about two swans flying by became a poem about sixteen swans swimming, and was eventually accepted and published as a poem about a cormorant.

If a poet’s studio is a serene place of beauty where words flow and great thoughts are written in flowing calligraphy, mine is more like a backstreet workshop where power tools scream and where things are bolted together roughly and beaten into shape with hammers.

Eventually I will rewrite the one about the two swans flying by.  I liiked it and it contained an idea that didn’t work with cormorants.

Guess what the theme of today’s photos is . . .