Posting and waiting for feedback

I've just posted a sonnet I wrote a little while ago on a poetry workshop website. I'm waiting for feedback and almost biting my nails down to the knuckle...well, I would if I bit my nails, but you get the idea.
It's ridiculous because I've had poetry published, I've had articles published - I had a regular column in a magazine for goodness sake! Yet still I'm worried about how this piece will fare in amongst potentially hostile waters....and it's quite a challenging piece as it includes text speak and references to Facebook, the Poetry World, if there is such a place, may not like that.

That's tough.

I like the poem and I think it's got potential. When it gets published somewhere I'll post it here. Most recently I had a poem called India, March 1992 published on Angelic Dynamo. The only problem is that there are a couple of rogue commas in there and every time I see it they make me cringe!

I guess that's always a problem for writers - tinkering.

On having a crisis of faith

I’m currently having a creative crisis of faith – not any religious faith you understand, although I suppose that would be rather useful for me right now – faith in my writing and its (my?) abilities. It’s the nature of writing to be rejected at every turn until at last it finds some receptacle – be that a journal, magazine, publisher, or wastepaper bin. I know that writers have to be thick skinned, believe in their work, keep refining their writing, keep reading, keep networking and all those other worthy pursuits. I realise that the readership for new poetry is tiny and by my reading more and publicising more other new writers I’ll increase my own slice of the literary pie – or at the very least there’ll be a few more crumbs to go around.

It’s hard work keeping the faith and getting out there, it just is. I feel like a petulant child – I want to be taken notice of but equally if someone did make a big deal about my work I’d be suspicious mainly because I’m not sure I’ve paid my dues or have enough knowledge yet. I think that’s the biggest obstacle for any new writer – looking at what’s gone before and realising that you probably can’t match up to most of it and you probably never will. It’s the Socratic idea of knowing that you know nothing – how bloody depressing.

Notting Hill? Nah...more like William Hill

I had a Notting Hill moment just now – I’ve come into work to catch up on paperwork and concentrate my mind. So I’d just got off the bus, stopped in Starbucks to pick up my usual (grande skinny wet almond latte as you asked), turned on my iPod (a gift of course – I wouldn’t spend that sort of money on a label myself...but I’d ask for one for Christmas...), walked out listening to Hard-Fi – ‘Living for the weekend’ and on into the market square. The sun was shining and as I glanced over at one of the stalls the guy manning it caught my eye and he smiled at me – a big full on Hollywood smile as I’m sipping my fancy American coffee and listening to British indie music...I was Julia Roberts for ten seconds. The music became the soundtrack to my filmic life. A half smile played on my lips for the remainder of my stroll to work – even as I passed an al fresco art class where (just like the best cinema traditions) the teacher was a chap I’d been an undergrad fine art student with and his class were sketching statues that not only I’d seen erected but I even know the artist personally.
I am a camera.







And I drink waaaay too much coffee.

Books - or "How well read am I?"

I love the opportunity to show off and I don't believe I'm that different from most people, so I found this list of books that you tick off to show just how well read you are. I suppose it's a form of bragging but geek bragging. Sort of similar to seeing other parents at the school gate or on the rugby pitch in September, first day of term and asking where they went on holiday during the summer. Normally my answer is embellished with Enid Blyton-esque homespun goodness with imagined Kath Kidson accessories - never would I reply that we'd stayed at home all summer because we couldn't afford to go anywhere, good grief no! I'm far too concerned with others opinions of me, yet sufficiently Catholic enough to abhor total deception, and sufficently of the Hyacinth Bucket school of snobbery to imply I'm better than in reality I am. In short, I'm all about spin.
So in keeping with making me look good (and feel free to copy the list and stick it in your own blog with your own reading history) here's this list.

You are supposed to:

Look at the list and:

1) Bold those you have read.

2) Italicise those you intend to read.

3) [Bracket] the books you LOVE.

4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (I want to read Wide Sargasso Sea so I think I ought to read this first)

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible (not the entire thing but I would say undoubtedly that it's the most important work of literature in the history of man and therefore everyone should read at least parts of it)

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (this has been sitting on a shelf with the first chapter read and reread over the years, really must finish it)

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 [Little Women] - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (okay, not the Complete Works, but more than enough to list them here singly)

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 [Birdsong] - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (I did read Mill on the Floss and remain cross with Maggie Tulliver twenty years on)

21 [Gone With The Wind] - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 [Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis]

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (but I could add in Northanger Abbey which was excellent)

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie-the-Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (felt a bit cheated by The Blind Assassin but I did enjoy the film of this book)

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 [Atonement - Ian McEwan]

51High Fidelity - Nick Hornby

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (recently read My Melancholy Whores and loved it so I want to read this one next)

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (read The Pearl and that put me off Steinbeck but I know this is a classic…maybe I should read it)

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (read The Enchantress of Florence and adore it so must read this too)

70 Moby-Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce (Dubliners is sitting staring at me from the To Read shelf)

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - A. S. Byatt (another one staring at me from the To Read shelf)

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (halfway through and guess where it now sits with its metaphorical arms folded with disapproval)

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 [The Faraway Tree Collection] - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (and another on the shelf)

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 [The Wasp Factory] - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (on the shelf too…)

Pasted from <http://pinksunshine.wordpress.com/2008/07/29/how-well-read-am-i/>

Snow Day

The most snow we've had in 18 years apparently. The south east of England is currently being hit by snow - the trains were cancelled, buses stopped in London and the major, Boris Johnson cancelled the congestion charge for the day.
My kids stayed home and we had a snow day - I had to cancel my class this afternoon because the weather was closing in again, in fact it's snowing now as I write this. We went walking with P in the woods and it looked like Narnia. I love the way the entire countryside becomes silent when it snows as if it's taking a pause, waiting for something to happen.
That's how today has felt - like a pause in between the weekend and the week proper starting. Certainly my week now feels fractured - I didn't teach my class, a meal we had planned with friends in London tomorrow night looks very doubtful, my yoga class was cancelled and my pilates class tomorrow is not looking good.

With a mention of both yoga and pilates I do realise that sounds as if I've somehow become a WAG (a footballers' Wives And Girlfriends - you know the type - they look very groomed and have perfect figures, perma-tan, plenty of bling but often no brain) but after a mountain bike accident back in June 2008 and a couple of climbing falls in September 2008 my back needs some work.

This post feels sort of aimless, it's wandering about and not really doing anything of use.

Rather like me today. I'm taking my silent pause and waiting for real life to happen tomorrow.

Are you busy?

I'm sitting surrounded by books, notes, course handbooks, assignments and other bits and pieces all to do with work. My laptop is perched on my lap (of course) and shares the space with a sleeping cat.
How much work have I done today?
Very little.
I keep telling myself that if I had a proper office or study I'd get loads of work done - I'd be able to leave things out and come back to them, I'd be able to shut the door on it all and go back during the early hours if I wanted.
I think I'd be just the same as I am now - avoiding work.

The really strange thing is that I love my job - it's the best job in the world. I get to have interesting conversations about literature or art every week. I get to read and study things that I would probably just skim over because now I have to know about them in order to teach them. And on top of all that I even get paid.
So why don't I just get down to it and work?

I enjoy the procrastination of reading blogs, of checking Facebook, of updating Twitter, of laughing at the latest posts on b3ta.

Take the internet away from me and my productivity would rocket. I'd also probably read more too.

The answer is clear.




But I don't want to change.

Indepence and getting out there

I bought some books online last night - buying books is a huge weakness of mine. Where most people have a vice like eating too much chocolate (I have that too), or smoking, or drinking, I can't walk past a bookshop without just popping in and leaving with two or three potential hours of escape.

These books were slightly different though, they weren't my usual fare of novels but rather these were poetry books. Not well known anthologies containing Elliot, Keats, Byron and Hughes but contemporary poetry written by poets who have to fund their writing through working in bars, bookshops, the Post Office, teaching. In fact all the 'normal' jobs that the rest of the population does. Yet these few souls also have the drive, the necessity of spirit to make time to write. The same could be said of many artists - they pull pints or teach sullen teenagers just so they have the money to create their real work.

And I'm looking at a card I bought in a bookshop a couple of months ago, it has a quote from Goethe printed upon it,

"Whatever you can do,
Or dream you can,
BEGIN IT!
Boldness has genius,
Power and magic in it."

So if you're one of those people who has always dreamt of writing a novel or climbing Everest, begin it now. Make plans now.

And if you want poetry published then start to read what's already out there, what's being written now, today by your postman or your neighbour. A good place to start is at either of these websites -

Blackheath Books - they're also on MySpace
and
Fortune Teller Press



That all feels like an advert or a motivational speech! But I suppose I'm feeling very fired up by all of this at the moment - I think it's because it's the beginning of the year - new year's resolutions and all that, and because the sun is shining and I always feel like achieving something when the weather is good.

Okay, sermon over.