Tag Archives: writing

Returning to Writing

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Sorry, I’ve become a bit hit and miss recently. Yesterday it occurred to me that it’s a good thing I’m not still at work,  because I’d have been off for most of the last month. It’s a lot more relaxing being retired than it was when i was simply off work. One day I may examine the difference, but for now I will just say that as a pensioner, the pay is better than when you are merely ill, and for some reason the time passes more easily.

The sun is going down as I type, though there is plenty of time to go before the sky takes on any colour. At the moment it is merely sinking and the light is shining off the various leaves in the garden. Holly, privet, roses, bamboo, conifers are all reacting differently to the light – some reflecting it, others allowing it to shine through, and it is quite an interesting garden view, considering that it is mainly green.

It feels like I’m returning to writing again, after a lay off of several months. I have not submitted anything since March and missed a couple of significant submission chances last month. Time to get back in the game before I lose the habit. In coaching they used to say it only takes a fortnight to lose a habit, which is awkward, considering that most people take a two week holiday, almost ensuring they they lose all their good habits. This has always given me pause for thought.

Twenty years ago, as I think I told you in a previous post, I did actually stop writing and it took me years to get back into the swing of things, It took me something like two years of constant practice to start producing usable pieces, even though I wrote thousands of words a week. This blog is a result of some of those early practice attempts.

I’m hoping it will be easier this time. I had better give it a serious go tonight, as there’s only a week left until submissions windows close at the end of the month and both the journals in question are ones I would like to be in.

Stone on the Floor

Telephone Calls and Other Stories

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The river Wye at Bakewell

Sorry, I took my eye off the ball again. Not only have I missed a couple of days posting but I have realised I have stopped writing poetry again.

About 20 years ago, after having a dozen poems published, I went into hospital, came out of hospital, tried continuing my poetry writing and found I couldn’t do it. I seem to have done it again. After struggling through Covid, a urinary infection and whooping cough, I go into hospital again and when I emerge, I find my urge to write poetry and be creative has gone. I didn’t notice at first but this morning it suddenly dawned on me.

The river Wye at Bakewell

I wonder if there is a causal link between having surgical instruments inserted through an inconvenient orifice and the poetic bits of my brain shutting down. There is certainly a correlation between the insertions and the bits of brain that deal with embarrassment shutting down.  If they didn’t, I’d be a gibbering wreck by now.

Last time, I had the kids to replace my writing, as they needed a lot of driving to rugby matches and I ended up managing teams and writing match reports. This time, I am sure I could substitute blogging and Facebook posts for the Numismatic Society  of Nottinghamshire, but I intend trying to get my enthusiasm back.

First I need to sort my health out. To that end I spent nearly two hours on the phone this afternoon trying to sort things out. One of the phone calls took me just over half an hour – 25 minutes being told I was in “Queue position Number Two”, two minutes in position Number One and five minutes establishing that what should have been done two weeks ago had not been done. It will, they assure me, now be done as a matter of urgency.

River Nene, Fotheringhay

If you ever have to deal with what is now known as the Bowel and Bladder Service in Nottingham, you have my sympathy.

They used to be known as the Continence Service.

I’m sure that there ae other words that could be used, which carry neither the stigma of incontinence or the suggestion that you are now entering the final, downhill, stage of your life.

However, the name isn’t the worst thing about the service. In an unfortunate double use of the same word, it’s the service that is the worst thing about the service.

Two weeks ago I rang them about obtaining extra night bags. Their phone system cut me off automatically, as reported, and then wouldn’t let me back in the queue. I eventually obtained the bags from the urology ward.

Sandsend – river and bridge

Today I needed to find out what was happening to what I will euphemistically refer to as “my supplies”. I rang several places in search of sense before being advised to ring the continence service. With a heavy heart, I did.

They answered on the third ring and I was, frankly, amazed. It didn’t last. It seems that the Continence Service based at Sherwood Rise Medical Centre isn’t the Continence Service at Sherwood etc isn’t the same Continence Service that I used to be registered with, and who supplied me for years.

The Continence Service (etc) is only for patients registered with the county of Nottinghamshire. I’m with the City of Nottingham, it seems, and have to ring another number.

So I did.

See the comments above on the half hour phone call.

All it needed two weeks ago was for one nurse to fill out one form. I’m not sure that it even needed a nurse – I could probably have done it myself if they had pointed me to the form.

More pictures of water. Enough said.

Ducks on the River Alde, Snape

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

An Unimpressive Monday

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Well, I can’t say I’ve covered myself in glory from a work point of view. It’s past 3pm and I’ve only just remembered to draw the living room curtains (it was still dark when Julia left this morning). I have tinkered with a  few poems, completed two (I think) and checked up the recipe for tonight’s meal. Not that it’s much of  recipe, I was just checking I had all the bits.

I’m now going to do the washing up to make it look like I’ve done something useful. When I finish I  . . .

Oh dear, Julia just came back and I haven’t even washed up. I’d better go and be attentive.

Fortunately she’s in a forgiving mood, so I will make tea and toast some crumpets and be an all round good husband.

Later . . .

The tea and crumpets worked. I then made the baked salmon with rice and vegetables which turned out to be quite pleasant (even though I’m not keen on salmon) and the evening went well.

Overall, the day was not a great success as I didn’t really get enough done. I will do the washing up sooner next week and make a more impressive evening meal – perhaps something with Hasselback potatoes, though they aren’t so impressive now that they are advertising frozen ones on TV.

The trick, if you feel like making them, is to lay the potato between the handles of two wooden spoons so that when you cut down the knife cannot go all the way through.

Not sure what we are having tomorrow, though Julia did suggest that standard vegetable stew would be fine. That’s good, because it’s very simple. I am, in case you are wondering, doing most of the cooking at the moment as Julia had three weeks of it over Christmas because of my incapacity. It’s payback time.

Vegetables – Carsington Water

The Internal Monologue of a Nobody

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It’s strange how, at the end of the day, I have difficult remembering the most exciting part of the day. Yesterday, despite writing about parcels, I actually did have a more interesting event. I was driving to work when a police car pulled out of the traffic queue on the othet side of the road and accelerated towards me with all lights flashing. For a split second, I experienced a feeling of alertness and increased heartbeat.

Then it was gone.

It was a surprise but there was plenty of space to change lanes and get out of the way. And then, bit by bit, a day of crushing dreariness erased my memory. It’s strange what you forget.

Most days are the same. There may be a touch of excitement, but the grinding routine drives it out. I could probably describe a day in 10,000 words, but 9,500 of them would not be very interesting.

“. . . then I packed another parcel. This one was for Australia. You can’t post to Australia by ‘Tracked & Signed’ postage so we use ‘Signed’. You have to remember to use a blue ‘Air Mail” sticker on envelopes for overseas. They have just changed the customs stickers, there is just one sort now. The ones that used to be barcoded are obsolete and the Post Office now prints a barcode and sticks it on. This doesn’t make much difference to us, apart from leaving enough space on the front of the envelope to fit the sticker on.”

That’s 96 words on current trends in posting letters overseas. Fascinating is not a word that I would use in describing the content. There’s plenty more where that comes from. I’ve posted two packages to Australia today, and just one to UK. That was it. I’d finished by the time the others arrived.

I could do at least the same again on postage, then go on to brewing tea, customers, poor quality stock, boredom, home grown tomatoes having thick skins and my plans to invent a biro which returns itself to your desk after people take it away. That’s already looking like it could go over 2,000 words and it’s only covering half an hour. I have many words to offer, but little of interest.

It could end up as a cult novella – The Internal Monologue of a Nobody.

Photo by Roman Koval 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

Composing, Cliches and Searching for Subjects

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I’m back at work and being creative. If you can call poetry “work” and if you can call my work “creative”. mainly I just feed off the work of other people and potter about in the middle of a shared cloud of words.

Spring is coming, flowers are coming out and trees are gently unfolding their blossom. It is a time of cliche for all writers of Japanese style poetry. That blossom will blow across grass and wet tarmac, will be picked up on shoes, will be trodden into oblivion and will fall into bad company as all the cliches come out to play. I can’t help it. I have a limited number of experiences to draw on, being a non-mobile urban poet.

Litter, discarded shoes and magpies make up a lot of my world. Delivery vans, memories and ragged gardens all play their part. I should probably go back to sitting in car parks and watching people pass by.

In an effort to return to previous times I have returned to composing on paper and copying to the computer. It’s a shame because I was just getting used to composing on the screen. However, needs must, and if the price of writing more is that I have to do more copy typing, that is the price I will pay. At the moment I don’t have much choice.

Last month was the first one in years where I submitted nothing and that clearly can’t go on. To write well, you have to start by writing something. Similarly, if you want ideas, you have to start writing, as it’s well established that the more ideas you use, the more you will have. I suppose that they will eventually dry up, but that’s a mawkish reflection for another day.

(Sorry, wrote this yesterday and went to bed before posting – more to follow today.)

Still Struggling

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Much of writing a slideshow presentation involves the same difficulty as writing a poem, with the extra difficulty of facts and photos being thrown in.

I’ve successfully procrastinated for eight months now, and followed that up with evasion, displacement activity and sloth over the last few months. That moved on to struggling to write in the last couple of weeks as I just couldn’t get into it. That is quite like poetry, though the timescale is different. I did managed to produce some photos, facts and slides but I couldn’t get the narrative going and my internal editor has seen me start and restart the presentation a dozen times. In the end I decided to put my head down and start writing. Eventually, it came right.

I now have a suitable opening and quite a lot of other bits and pieces. I also have 24 hours and 13 minutes before I am supposed to turn up to the meeting (I decided to take Monday off work – I could do with a break and I need the time to finish.

The plan is to blast through the rest of the slides tonight and establish the order and narrative. I will check the timing and write a list of things that still need doing. I will finalise it tomorrow morning before I take and load any extra photographs I need, check facts and write the prompts. I don’t need prompts as such, because it’s all on screen or in my head, but there are always a few last minute facts to note. Mainly though, I do it as practice and memory training and, to be honest, in case the presentation doesn’t work and I have to revert to the old-fashioned method of talking at a crowd.

That, I think, is about it. I will load this post and get back to work.

Shakespeare Medallion by Paul Vincze

New Horizons

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My original plan was to buy enough food so that I could pass the Christmas week without going out to shop. As I take stock, it’s possible that I overdid things. Apart from milk and bread I probably don’t need anything until the second week of January and there are certain things, like Christmas pudding, that won’t be eaten until Spring. I find a little goes a long way and as we ate the one that Number One Son brought with, we don’t need more for some time.

Because we broke the microwave we did at least boil the one we had, which made it more palatable. Microwaved Christmas pudding is rarely a success, but after a Christmas season of large roast dinners I cannot be bothered with the palaver of boiling a pudding. It’s one of those circular things – the less you like pudding, the more you fail to treat it well, and the worse you treat it, the less you like pudding.

I’ve just been reading a book about writing. It’s the first book I’ve read properly for over a year. I really need a reading lamp because my eyes are dimming (which sounds like a cue for half-remembered song)  and I should buy a reading lamp. Julia bought me a new Kindle for  Christmas, which is pretty much the same thing.  In terms of light, that is. In terms of books, it’s still quite different. I don’t buy expensive books for my Kindle as you don’t really get anything from your money apart from renting a few pixels. (t’s a bit like NFTs).

I tried reading that link – it still makes little sense. basically an NFT is a picture which people believe is worth something. It’s a bit like buying a suit from the same tailor that made the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Or as Jimmy Carr put it last night on TV – and NFT is a con trick bought by an idiot. I think that’s probably the best definition I’ve heard yet. Don’t Google him, you probably wouldn’t like him as a comedian. But as a social commentator he’s spot on.

Anyway, the book, which I last mentioned some paragraphs ago, was talking about how to improve your writing. The author writes 750 words a day. I’ve been knocking out my 250 a day fro so long it’s become the norm. I used to do a thousand in various forms, but gradually reduced to a single blog post with a minimum target of 250 words. Then I allowed the 250 words to become the limit. That could be the cause of several of the problems I am finding with writing. Looks like it’s time to set some new targets.

 

Some thoughts on Long Covid

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I made six submissions last month, all apart from one were in the final week of the month. This month I have only two submissions to make, and have made them both already.

This is a welcome return to what I consider normality. Twelve months ago I was able to make the month’s submissions on the days the submission windows opened. Illness intervened and I found myself entering a period where I was mainly editing work that was already written, and I was struggling to complete it and submit for the end of the period. After six months I started writing new poems again, and it is only this month that I have managed to get far enough ahead to submit closer to the beginning of the period.

I could have submitted sooner, but have become lazy in the last year.

The advantage of submitting earlier in the period is that (in my theory, at least) you establish yourself as the favoured candidate, and later submissions have to work harder to push you out.

The advantage of submitting later is that you (probably) have more time to let the piece mature (unless, like me, you are struggling to keep up) and you get answers quicker, as decisions are made within days of submission rather than waiting until the end of the month.

In years to come, the mythical PhD student I always think I’m writing for, will be able to read this post and add it to the list of Long Covid symptoms – difficulty in writing new poetry. I didn’t write anything new for several months after Covid, and even struggled to knock the existing writing into shape. I then spent a long time struggling to write anything new – resulting in missed deadlines and lots of last minute submissions. Finally I managed to find some form and, for the last month, have finally started writing with fluidity again. The plan for next month is that I will submit as much as possible in the first week of the month, using things which I am finalising now.

What a difference a year makes.