Category Archives: writing

The Day Part 2

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Sunset, Codnor, Notts

It has not been a wasted day. I have mustered my rejects from the last round of submissions and have improved several of them. I have identified my new list of targets, including one that has resisted me so far.

In non-poetry matters i have cleared a small patch of desk and finished the first draft of an article on medallions. It’s only for the Numismatic Society but it’s a start.

Julia is at the hairdresser so I am now going to make soup and something for the evening meal. This is a twofold win. First it saves her having to cook and second it means the house smells good when she walks in. With any luck I will remember to tell her that her hair looks nice. I have a terrible record of forgetting that.

All that work and it’s only just mid-day.

Sunset and chimney pots

I made soup (sweet potato and chilli) and a mixed vegetable hash (though it could have been stew or more soup). This raises an interesting point bout my cookery. Change a few ingredients and it becomes something else. For a moment I felt guilty at serving general purpose slop over the years, then I realised that Sunday Lunch, roast pork and sausages with roasted veg are all basically the same thing too – just roasted veg with dead animals. Yes, you need Yorkshire pudding for one, apple sauce for another and different flavours of gravy, but they are all pretty much the same too. Having sorted that out in my mind I no longer feel so bad.

It’s not “chicken liver parfait, with pear chutney, pickled cranberry ketchup, chicken skin & toasted sourdough” as offered by one of our local restaurants, but it ill do. Incidentally, if I could be bothered I would definitely book a meal here – even at £45 per person for three courses it looks good compared to ringing Just Eat and ordering second class food to be delivered lukewarm. I suspect that one of my faults over the years has been that I have settled for second best. I like fried chicken, burgers and generic curry but “pork tenderloin with sticky miso glazed cheek, apple & BBQ hispi cabbage” sounds so much nicer. Maybe I should have valued myself more highly.

(And yes, I did remember to mention that Julia’s hair looked nice.)

Sunset, Langley Mill by-pass

More Rejection

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I had another rejection this morning. That’s two this month, though as it was a month of pushing the boundaries it’s not a surprise. I had four earlier in the year (three of which were actually competition entries). Over the years I have not had much luck with competitions – I’ve been commended twice, which is better than  nothing, but not great when you consider the cost of entry fees. As I said before, I have learned to cope with rejection over the years. I’m still no farter on with my thinking about the direction to take and the effort to put in.

I know I should be concentrating on writing haiku until I get better at them but I have two problems here. One is that I don’t actually know what “better” is. A lot of haiku I read don’t seem any better than mine, and in many cases feature things which, according to the various “guidelines” shouldn’t be in haiku (remember they very small poems with very large mounts of rules.) An editor i was in correspondence with recently told me that when they started writing haiku they decided which rules they were going to adopt and just kept plugging away. I might do that. Or I might just relegate haiku to something I do to fill in time on a slow month.

The other problem is that I like being published (though it’s not the driving force it used to be) and I’m lazy. I may as well write what I enjoy and what I’m good at. If I were being paid for poetry that’s definitely what I would do.

However, I don’t need to make a decision yet.

This morning I printed out four poems which I am sending to a magazine that sticks to the old-fashioned ways, including submissions by post. After printing and before sending off, I looked at them and realised the top one was a long way from “finished”. The second one was so bad it immediately provoked me into making notes on it. I didn’t follow up, as I had to get to work, but it was an interesting lesson. I suspect that reading words printed on paper, instead of on a screen,  triggers a new set of critical thoughts. Tomorrow I will set to revising. I may have to start printing everything out in future.

Now it’s time to get some work done and go to bed. I have a blood test at 7am so I need to get some sleep.

My Orange Parker Pen

A Tale, Told by an Idiot

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Do you remember a few days ago when I said ” from today I am going to set targets and become a writing machine”. Well I did. I set up my poem factory and set to work. I also found a few places to make more submissions and decided to target haiku. As a result, I had an acceptance today.

It’s part of the power of positive thinking. I was going to get rid of some books last week. They are mainly old sales and marketing books passed on by my Dad, but with some motivational books too.. Many of them are actually still relevant as good sales technique and positive thinking never goes out of fashion. There’s no mystique about it despite all the stuff that’s written. To make sales you ask the decision-maker for the order. To achieve success through positive thinking you do something, and you do it now.

That’s what I did – I wrote poems, I showed them to an editor and one was selected.

No jargon, no mystique, no spirituality, despite the reams of rubbish written on the subject. Just plain common sense.

The poem factory is a similar no nonsense set-up. It is anathema to all the proper, spiritual poets out there. They believe (and this is particularly true with haiku) that you should experience “a moment” and compose the poem there and then. Good on them. I’ve done it sometimes, but it’s not common.

Poems which are stitched together from memory or manufactured from two moments or, heaven forbid, simply made up, are known. scornfully. as desk-ku. It’s becoming slightly more common to admit to them now, but there’s still some snobbery on the subject. Even the old masters did them, but the myth of the haiku moment persists.

Anyway, I write a list of ideas or prompts, or open up  file of old photos, or even open a book of poetry and mine it for ideas. As T S Eliot said  “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” I am, I feel, perfectly capable of taking an idea from a poem without copying the idea or the wording of the poem.

This is one I took from life, rather than nature.

I have dustier piles – trust me on this

a pile of books
the dust settles on my
good intentions

(First Published in Failed Haiku – forgot the date.)

This one is from nature, and done in the moment, but it doesn’t really convey the misty morning and the salty wind as we walked and watched seals.

Sea Buckthorn. I promise you there were goldfinches too, but I couldn’t get a good shot.

goldfinches
calling from the sea buckthorn
bright berries

(First Published in Presence 71)

This one was completely made up, but all the bits were true. Robins sing, blackthorn blooms early in the year and at the time, during Covid, we were forced to queue outside shops. I wrote it after queuing for a shop. I needed some props so I added the bird, the song and the blackthorn. Does it make me a bad man?

a robin
sings from the blackthorn
—we queue for the shop

(First published Wales Haiku Journal Spring 2021) 

Robin - singing

Robin – singing. OK, it’s in holly, but give me a break.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

(Macbeth, William Shakespeare).

I may start stealing from Shakespeare next. Let’s face it, he stole all the time.

More Work, Less Play

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Finally I seem to be getting back in the groove and, for once, actually have things written in advance. Although I had enough for three submissions last night, it still took me the best part of two hours to send them off. Each magazine wants a different format, and even though they want the same information, they want it in different forms and in one case, are very keen that you do it in a very specific order. By the time I’d finished sorting all that out, I then noticed some ways to “improve” the poems one last time. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Anyway, it’s done. I’m planning on making six submissions this month. I’d better get a move on, because one of them closes on 25th and i haven’t started writing it yet. Out of the six, three are to places where I submit regularly. Two are to places I submit to irregularly (I’ve been giving them a miss recently, during my dry spell) and one is to a magazine that has never accepted anything from me, and where I haven’t submitted for about three years.

This is getting back to the old days when it was all about the submissions, and I had plenty of material to send. Recently, with less to send I’ve been playing safe and only submitting to the easy ones. This change of attitude is, I think, the last thing I needed to do to get back to the old way of doing things. All I need now is plenty of ideas. That’s another area where I’ve been struggling but it seems that as my writing is picking up pace, so is the generation of ideas. I have read articles that claim you get more ideas if you write more and so far it seems to be the case.

Of course, I’m a narcissist and I write to see my name in print, so the real test will be to see if I increase my acceptances, not just my workload.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Scattered Thoughts

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During the course of the day I think of so much stuff that I could, if I made notes, probably write 5,000 words on my day and my thoughts. Obviously I won’t, as I’m disorganised and lazy.

As a result of yesterday’s planning I am gathering material for submissions. My normal practice over the last few months has been to get to the end of the month then decide only to submit a selection. Now I’m planning and have numbers to think about, I am looking at sending stuff to all the possible outlets and have even started writing haiku again. I’m a poor writer of haiku but I ned to improve as they are an important part of writing Haibun. I had stopped writing so many Haibun and transferred to writing tank prose because the tanka is much easier to write. Now, again as a reaction to the numbers, I find myself needing to improve my haiku to improve my Haibun.

I may have talked about my looming retirement a bit too much lately. I may also have touched on the idea that one of my new projects is making sure I live long enough to reach retirement. I note today that two well known personalities, George Alagiah (well known British news reader) and Trevor Francis (famous footballer) have both died. Alagiah was 67 and Francis was 69. They both seem to have been decent blokes over the years and it’s a shame to lose them.  It’s also a bit too close to my age for me to feel comfortable. I am about the age my Mum was when we had to stop her reading out the ages of people in the newspaper obituaries.

There is an article on the internet about writing. The title is “Surprising hobby could help older people stave off dementia – new study findings”. It suggests that writing letters, keeping a diary or using a computer could help reduce your chance of Alzheimer’s by 11%. Another story says “literary activities”. This is good news for anyone on WordPress.

However, why is it surprising?

Apart from the Alzheimer’s benefits I’m sure that regular writing keeps my mood up. I also know that blogging, and the people I “talked” to during lockdown, helped keep me stable in an uncertain time.

It’s no surprise to me tat writing is good for you. What do you think?

Orange Parker Pen

Day 94

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Failed Haiku is out. Actually it’s been out a few days but I only just got round to looking at it. I have three senryu on page 84. I just looked and realised you can just type 84 in the box at the beginning. There really is a lot I never knew about computers.

The figures for this year are Submissions 14, Acceptances 6, Pending 5, Refused 2, Lost in Cyberspace 1.I’m reasonably happy with that, though it has to be said that I have let three or four chances to submit slide by, and they are invariably the places I find harder to get into. This tends to make the figures favour me.

I really have to get back to the target of 100 submissions and get well out of my comfort zone. It makes me try harder and and puts rejection into context. However, I’ve covered this before.

The rest of the day followed well worn channels. We generally don’t get many calls or customers on a Monday, as we always used to be closed. That was a tradition from the days when the owner did coin fairs on Sundays. I generally worked on Mondays when i was doing fairs because I had regular markets to do or a shop to open (we were opposite an auctioneer that held Monday sales, so we had plenty of trade customers on a Monday).

My slow days were Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. I used to go to auctions or other shops in mid-week. Unfortunately so did a lot of other shops so I ended up visiting a lot of closed shops. It was, I suppose, one of the many flaws in my business plan.

Silver Britannia coin

Day 81

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Today I sorted a collection of tickets. Some of them are bus tickets and some relate to things like toll bridges and ferries, but many of them are considerably less interesting than that. Fortunately I have the day off tomorrow and will do some exercises to raise my enthusiasm levels.

Some of them have adverts on the back, and at least one of the adverts refers to rationing, so I’m guessing they go back to the 1940s in some cases.

After looking at all the pictures from previous years, I am starting to feel restless and would like to get out more. All I need to do is find a place that is crammed with interest, devoid of people, and accessible to a man with bad knees and a stick. It’s not as easy as it sounds.

I’m hoping to get an early start tomorrow and get a parking space close to phlebotomy for my overdue blood tests. After that I have a couple of errands to do and plan on spending the rest of the day getting to grips with some writing.

It’s all about practice. The more you write, the better you get. When I decided to start writing poetry again, about the time I started writing this blog, it must have taken a good two years before I started writing to an acceptable level.

This time, six months after being ill, I am struggling again. The quality is OK now, but the quantity isn’t there yet and I’m looking at four deadlines at the end of the week and only enough material for one submission.

That’s why I need a major effort tomorrow – lots of editing to do.

Day 77

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Tonight, I noticed that 2022 in Roman numerals, as used in film credits, is MMXXII. In 200 years it will be MMCCXXII. OK, it’s not as easy to read as 2022 and 2222, but it’s more decorative and more fun.

I moved on to discuss date writing conventions of the world. I searched for “dating conventions” but soon realised that it wasn’t the information that I wanted, It seems that the Americans do it differently to the rest of the world because they preserved the original format used by the British before 1776.

This has been bugging me recently because a journal I submit to has started instructing me to use the American system in my submissions. This is one of a number of instructions editors of various journals have been issuing recently. Strangely, they also say they favour the Chicago Manual of Style for certain things – though the date isn’t one. The Chicago Manual of Style does not recommend the American date format as it is felt to be ambiguous.

This is irritating, because I don’t like micromanagement, but that’s how it is. If I want to be published I submit in the style requested. However, things have now moved on. They are going to have a themed issue. I don’t like themed issues. I write for enjoyment, not because I want to engage in a glorified writing exercise. It’s nice to have editorial input, but I don’t crave publication like a  drug.I’m going to sit this one out.

Even if I did decide to submit, it’s unlikely that anything I write on the subject of war and human stupidity will be as good as this, so I’ll stick to writing about birds and Julia and traffic jams.

Day 67

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I heard back from one of my other submissions. Another acceptance. Too easy. Something bad must happen soon. I will become complacent, or editors will realise that deep down I am not worth publishing . . .

Success can be  a troublesome thing to deal with. My previous four attempts were turned down on the basis of obscurity, being late and not being good enough (twice). In some ways I find that easier to deal with, which is really the wrong way round. You often see articles about how to cope with rejection, but nothing about how to cope with success. Maybe I should write that as an article – it would be more original than another one about coping with rejection.

That’s a question – is it possible to be “more original” or is it like pregnancy and uniqueness? You can’t be “more pregnant” or “slightly pregnant”. You can, according to some people be “nearly unique” , “almost unique” and various other types of unique, but they all really mean “not unique” and are a misuse of the word. I saw one example on eBay that was properly used but hilarious in context.

Someone ha listed an item as “rare”. This, in eBay speak just means “I have not seen one before”. Five sales down the page was another of these rare items, which tends to suggest they may not be rare. The second one, which made me laugh, was described as “unique”. Clearly it wasn’t.

And that’s what made me think about my statement above – can you be “more original”?, Or is it simply “original” or “not original”? Have I fallen into sloppy writing habits?

What do you think?

Stone on the Floor

 

 

 

Day 43

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I’ve just finished the first phase of planning my submissions for next year. So far I have 53 submissions in the planner, and I haven’t quite finished. I will have about 75 by the time I have finished. No doubt I’ll miss a few, but you need some sort of target, and it should always be slightly more than you think you can achieve.

Set a target too low and it’s not worth having. Set it too high and you risk demotivating yourself. Last year I made 48 submissions, though I was ill for a couple of months and would have managed around 55 if i’d been fit. Seventy five for this year seems fair as a target. I still need to add a couple of magazines that always reject me (I need a challenge) and some ordinary poetry magazines too. Life isn’t all about Japanese forms of poetry.

It feels good to have the plan done, even if it is incomplete. At last I have something to compare myself to, and it’s always easier to work when you have  a framework in place. Without one, it’s easy to drift.

When I look at the actual figures, I see that I met or slightly exceeded the targets for numbers of acceptances last year, being on target for haibun and a few over for haiku. I also wrote a few tanka, which weren’t included in the targets, as I hadn’t even thought of writing tanka when I set the targets. Then there were the six “normal” poems. There is no target for them as I just fit them in when I have time and they aren’t a particularly high priority.