I’ve never thought of myself as a stubborn type but there must be something mulish about me as I persist in trying to reach the end of National Blog Posting Month.
I am running out of blogging ideas and I am thinking about blogging when I should be doing other stuff. It’s not meant to be like this! I’m not a living to blog type, I’m more of a ‘I quite enjoy blogging and at least people know how to get hold of me’ type. I’m even writing this post two days ahead of when it will be posted and I’ve already posted something that was quite happily settled in my ‘draft’ file and was not ever meant to be seen in public. Daring times.
What else have I been doing? I managed to send off three poems for children to The Emma Press for their open submissions call. I don’t usually mention where I’ve submitted to but, heck, I’m becoming reckless and wild with all this blogging. I haven’t written a huge amount of children’s poetry but it’s something I’ve become more and more interested in, especially since running workshops in schools and, for example, running workshops for National Poetry Day at Trowbridge Town Hall last month. Someone who taught me when I was an undergraduate recently suggested I should think more about writing for children. Perhaps they said this because my style of poetry is straightforward and accessible..? I don’t know. The Emma Press seemed like too good an opportunity to miss but I might fail miserably, of course. It will be ages before they let people know which poems they’ve accepted (it’s for an anthology of poems about British and Irish Kings and Queens).
I’m teaching my adult poetry classes at the Town Hall for a second term – we’re already two sessions in and have mostly been thinking about sequences and themed collections. I need a clear day to plan the final three sessions – so the scheduling and planning of blog posts is a good idea. We had the third meeting of our Poetry Society Stanza group at the Town Hall last Monday. It’s been decided that the December meeting (12th December) will be an open-mic night – but I’ll write a post about that soon, to help spread the word.
There are other projects I’m tinkering with and I will actually get back to right now. If you’re still on the NaBloPoMo and NanoPoblano track, keep up the great work. Hope to see you by the finishing post.
Josephine Corcoran 