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.

ST. AGNES’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death....

These are the opening lines to Keats' poem, 'The Eve of St.Agnes', published in 1820. It's one of my favourite Romantic poems but it's particularly fitting at the moment because the Eve of St.Agnes is on the 20th of January, so only a couple of weeks away. These lines completely sum up how cold and bleak it is right now with snow on the ground and that grinding bitter chill that the wind has in January. Snow always brings a silence and draws in the world as sound no longer carries over the soft white blanket.

I was looking for a photograph which exists in my head - a snow covered field with a broken down fence picked out in black charcoal lines against the white canvas of the sky and to the left in the distance stands a solitary hare, the only sign of life in a wintry scene.

Very poetic.

However, no one appears to have taken this photograph or painted this image yet, so after a brief search on DeviantArt I found this rather beautiful one by Polaroid Dragon, it's called Dying Daylight.

And now after thinking about the cold I'm off out to a yoga class.

The Prose Poem

As promised, here's the link to the prose poem that I had accepted by Shadow Train.

The Seahorse

It's a prose poem which many of you may be unfamiliar with. Poets.org explain a little about prose poetry but I guess the simplest way is for you to read some prose poems.
Largely speaking they are published in a rectangular form - yes, I know, explaining how they look on the page seems a little strange, but it does mark them out as different from normal poetry. There are no hanging line breaks as you see in traditional poetry but in common with other forms of poetry they use rhythm, imagery, metaphor and symbolism.

I suppose I'd say that for any poem to have real resonance and therefore be any good in my opinion, it should stay with you - something about it should continue to haunt you for a while. Recently I bought a copy of Poems for the Retired Nihilist, Volume Two and one poem in particular has continued to sit in the corner of my mind rather like a fat angry moggy waiting for its lunch and watching my every move just in case I should drop a morsel of food which it can pounce on. The poem is Turquoise and it was written by Mark Hartenbach, I can't find it online but he has a blog full of his work - please go and look at it because it's not about flowers or fluffy animals but because it's about living now and that's the most that any poem can do - tell us what it's like to live now, here and this way.

And being accepted

Yesterday I wrote about having work rejected and how hard I often find it to actually do the work to start with.

Last night I received some bad news - the magazine that I normally write for has decided to have a shake up in its normal columnists and as I've been with them with the same format for three years it's time for me to go. Bad news for me but not really unexpected news - many magazines would have had me out after six months or a year at the most. So I've been very lucky and had a great opportunity to get my words out there to a fairly wide audience in the UK - you can even buy the magazine in WHSmiths and Tesco - it is a reasonably well known one. However as we all know, nothing lasts forever, not even the good things.

So that left me feeling even more rejected!

This morning I felt like crap but I knew I had to get back up on that literary horse and write the pages.

I'd also received an email late yesterday (the same time I got the email telling me my column was cancelled) rejecting some poetry of mine but telling me that perhaps another journal would be more suitable and giving me the name of the editor....

Climbing up into the saddle I emailed off the same four poems to the suggested publication.

An hour or so later I received a reply.

I can't say I wanted to open the reply - I didn't need to see yet another kind 'thanks but no thanks' message.

But I guess you already know what was there....

They want to use one of my poems in their next issue.

Now while it may not provide me with any money unlike the magazine job, it has got a certain cachet - the other contributors all appear to have been in print in very worthy publications and many have collections in print too.

And how do I fit into all this?

Well like just about any other writer I'm beginning to wonder when they'll discover that I'm a fraud and not really very good at this lark.

It has managed to kick start me into writing more poetry though and I can assure any concerned readers of this blog that I don't write terrible doggerel about animals.

But what do I write?

Once this poem is online with the magazine I'll post the link.

Meanwhile it's back to writing for me, now with the renewed expectation of possible acceptance!

Writing and being rejected

Again it's been ages since I posted here - I've gone from being a regular blogger to a sometimes one and the only excuse I have is that I've been writing so much more elsewhere.

I've been trying to be very disciplined with myself and to follow the Stephen King advice of writing at least 1,000 to 2,000 words each day.

That worked for at least two weeks. I was very proud of myself.

My problem seems to be that life just gets in the way - kids to take to and from school and other places, parents who need dropping off at airports and hospital appointments, friends who have to be kept up with, animals needing vets, cupboards needing filling, wardrobes lacking shoes....

Try and keep writing through all of that!

But of course I do because that is what I do. It tends to be a bit haphazard and some days I get a few hundred words down and other days I don't. I do need to write more but haven't we all got things that we really need to get done?

I read on a website the other day about the idea of setting yourself a specific target within a particular time frame - nothing exactly earth-shattering in this, but it did resonate with me.

And it's no good whining on about not having as much in print as you'd like if you don't actually submit stuff to editors - no one knows you're there unless you tell them.

And what's the worst they can say?

Email is a fabulous invention - I can send off half a dozen poems and I never have to see or speak to anyone about it. When I receive my rejection emails I can weep silently into my coffee without anyone knowing the reason why.

At least they're sending out rejection emails now, I used to just be ignored so I guess I must be doing something right somewhere along the line.


And even including this particular image of writing says so much about my idea of Good Writing and the value I put upon it. It gives away my intentions and expectations for my own writing but most of all it shows how terribly romantic I am about writing.

The other day I was talking about Salman Rushdie's latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence and I was saying how much this was my type of book because it reminds me of my earliest reading memories. I remember being taken to the library in my village and chosing a large cloth bound book of fairy tales. There were three that I can recall, one orange, one red and one yellow. Each contained stories from Grimms, Andersen or the Arabian Nights I think. I know now that these were the famous colour collections from Andrew Lang and in fact I managed to find an image of one of them - I found this on an auction house's site, the book is valued at around £50-£75 and dates from the 1920s - it's the same sort that I read as a child in the late 70s. It seemed old and smelled old even back then but that added to the precious nature of it. Thick yellowing pages and the smell of old wood and mushrooms.



And that's what keeps me reading and writing - I love returning to the world that was contained within those colourful books.

A long break

Two months since I posted last...that's appalling and I'm truly sorry if you've missed me!

I've just come back from a week in Scotland - taking the air at Ayr (sorry...).

Recently I wrote an article for a magazine all about the good work that the Forestry Commission is doing up in Scotland to help support rural businesses and rural pursuits. In the last year the Scottish economy was boosted by around £9,000,000 as a result of the huge interest in mountain biking. Scotland is now one of the world's best places to go both mountain and downhill biking outside of North America - in particular the 7Stanes - seven Forestry Commission owned sites in Dumfries and Galloway.

So last week I had a crack at the blue route at Glentrool and it was quite easy, I'm pleased to say! In fact I did it twice and didn't get off and walk at any of the downhill tricky bits. All of this sufficiently buoyed up my confidence for me to believe I could have a go at the red route at Ae, also known as the Ae Line.

Foolish woman.

It says it's 25km, but the day we did it a large chunk of the route was blocked off as they're harvesting the trees. So they'd constructed an extra route in order to keep everyone 'entertained'. The first bit of this new route was a half mile hike up a wooded hillside.

Well, that's okay, you'd think...er....no. Hillside is perhaps a bit of an understatement....a mountainside covered by a carpet of pine needles would perhaps be a better description. The hike was almost vertical and certainly impossible to ride a bike up! It was also very dark in there as the fir trees produced a Hobbitesque atmosphere - sound deadened and only a weak yellow light made its way through the arboreal gloom.

The next section was a little more opened out but still deep in the forest. Fortunately this section was flat...well, if you can call a path littered with ancient trees and stumps flat. I could barely get a single bike wheel between the fallen trees yet clearly other more experienced (mad) and braver (barking) souls had skipped and jumped on their bikes from bough to bough.

I walked and lifted my bike over the hazards. I'm sure the ride is now around 30km - the Forestry Commission recommends anything from 1.5 - 3 hours.

It took me nearer to 5 hours.

5 hours of terror, pain, exhaustion, shredded nerves, excitement, exhilaration, adrenaline, crying, screaming, laughing and a large bruise on my backside caused when I had my one and only stack.

My fall from grace....

I've described the route as being like a roller coaster on two wheels...in a quarry with a side order of Lord of the Rings and an Ewok village. Scary stuff.

So, was my fall a huge stack taken on a table-top jump? A huge drop off? A steep bermed curve perhaps?

No. I was in the woods on a gentle bit of single track....I'd just had a short walk as my nerve had deserted me and one side of the track was a rather steep drop down the mountainside. I got on my bike and ever so slowly tipped to the right - the same side as the steep drop. I fell in a heap with my head much lower than the rest of me, my legs still entangled in the bike frame. I narrowly avoided sliding all the way down the grassy drop....how? My backside decided to fix itself to a large and very hard rock. The bruising is particularly nasty and not fit for photographic reproduction.

Once I sort through my photographs I may post some of the more challenging parts of the holiday!