Tag: buddhism

poetry

My Next Book Launch

carolyncordon

I love book launches, especially when it’s my own book that’s being launched! I’ve never launched this kind of book before, a slim little volume known as a ‘chapbook’ or ‘chap book’.

These books are scaled down versions of poetry collections smaller both in size, and number of poems within the pages. Chap books are excellent for presenting your words to readers at a cost everyone should be able to afford, only $5.00! And they are so small and light, you can easily carry spare copies with you wherever you go, ready for a sale!

If you have a collection of twenty or so poems, all going together nicely why not consider putting them together for the interest of all! You can ask friends along for a coffee, talk about your collection, and then casually reach into your handbag or pocket, and show the book, just like that!

So a chap book doesn’t have to be ‘about’ anything, it can just be random poems, but I think it all holds together better if there is a theme, to be ‘about’ something. So what is my collection about? Well it’s about something painful, and very personal to me. It’s about my right ankle. In particular, it’s about my newly broken right ankle.

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This break happened at the end of September, I fell over and bang, two bones broken in my right ankle, and excruciating pain. Ambulance called, medical things done, hospital to hospital, to hospital, and finally home again. And then foot up, rest, rest, rest, healing happening all of the time.

With all of this rest, the obvious thing for me was to write poems about what was happening, both out of the window near the sofa I was reclining on to rest, foot up to reduce the swelling of my ankle. I wrote about being in hospital, the birds on our front lawn I could see, and a great many other things.

I in fact had over twenty poems, and I had a name for this proposed chap book as well. This book was going to be called “Angles on Ankles”, and it would cover a broad range of subjects related to my broken ankle. I know a publisher who publishes chap books as well as larger books, Ginninderra Press, so I approached them about possibly publishing this book. They were more than happy to have a look at what I’d written.

I sent the poems off, and suddenly, the book was done super quick, like it was meant to be!

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So once a new book comes into the world, the next step after sharing the book with close friends and family is often to launch the book into the greater world, to hold a Book Launch. So I’ve done some sharing with family and friends, and have now begun organising the book launch, at a venue that I know well, and that is happy to have poets there, doing their poetic things.

This venue is the Prince Albert Hotel, in Gawler, a hotel my writing group meets at every week, and one that is the venue for a monthly poetry reading, Gawler Poets at the Pub, held on the last Sunday of the month, every month.

So on the 29th of December, at the Prince Albert hotel, or the P/A as it is known by locals, I will be officially launching “Angles on Ankles”, reading some of the poems from the book, and talking about the whole ‘adventure’ of it all.

Poetry can be written about the most unlikely of subject matter!

Writing

What You’d Like To Know

carolyncordon

New writers are often given the advice to “Write what they know”. I don’t know who it was to first come up with that one, and I don’t really care who it was. I believe my advice, to write what you’d like to know is far better advice.

If you are writing non fiction on a subject, you will have so much more fun, and write a far more interesting piece, if you look more deeply into something you’d like to know more about. The research will be more fun and interesting, and by the end of your article or book, you could be well on your way to being an expert on the subject, with a new book to promote!

And if you’re writing fiction, have your main characters with different hobbies, or lifestyles, to what you have yourself, but that you’d like to know more about. The characters will then be new and interesting to you, and you will make them interesting to the reader, because they, and what they know or do, are interesting to you. I know about dogs, quite a bit about them, actually, but I don’t write books about dogs as the only point of interest. In my series about Buster the Dog, I write about Dogs and something else. The first book was dogs and gardening, the second dogs and mindfulness, and the final on was dogs and buddhism.

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These books were all written with Buster the Dog as the main character and they are in his point of view (first person POV). Dogs do many things that people do, but they don’t necessarily do them how people do them. In fact they often do them how people DON’T do them, and that is where the humour comes from.

I know more about dogs now, than I knew back when I wrote that first book “Dig It! Gardening Tips for Dogs”, and I know more about gardening now too. The same with Mindfulness and Buddhism, I know more about both of them before I wrote “Doggone It – Mindfulness from a Dog’s Point of View”, and “Dog Buddha’s Thoughts”. I had enormous fun researching the subjects, and thinking on how a dog would view the same things that I was learning about.

When your writing brings you joyful fun, it isn’t tedious getting the words written, it’s a good time. And talking about your books is still a fun thing to do, talking about dogs and the funny, silly things they sometimes do!

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