Tag: gardening

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Thinking About What To Write About Next …

carolyncordon

My mind is filled with so many ideas, it’s difficult to settle down to actually write anything, sometimes, like right now!
I had a fabulous idea to write about a plant that’s going well in our garden, making it a combination of giving information about herbs, and also including poetry, which is a very much favoured way to write for me.

This new plant has flowered, and I’ve noticed the bees around the place are very much attracted to the sweet little flowers that grow on this plant, which is new to me, having been icluded in a seed mix to plant out ro attract butterflies, and as I’ve noticed, also bees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borage

The plant is borage, and if you click on the link, you’ll see the lovely little blue flowers, and large leaves.

What I wanted to do, and may still do, is to write a bit about Borage, and how it came to be growing in our garden, and then post an Acrostic poem using “B O R A G E” as the starting letters of a six line poem about this delightful new plant …

So that’s one thing, but I also possibly could be writing more of the Cosy Murder Mystery Novel I’m possibly more that half way through, but have been more or less ignoring for far too long. I’ve also been ignoring this website of mine, even though I actually love writing and connecting with other people online!

And of course there are the other things on this website of mine, which is relatively new to me, and I’m not really sure about how to use effectively … I haven’t been loving it, so have been ignoring it, which anyone who comes here may realise.

The image above is definitely NOT what I wanted to post here, which proves how much I still need to learn about how to use this website! I’d actually taken that photograph for something else entirely, the monthly newsletter I create and distribute in my local town, Mallala.

The photo was of one of the entertainments at the 2025 Mallala Christmas Street Party, which curiously takes place mostly at the local oval, rather that the street …

Anyway, enough of this, it’s time to move on to other things now, and I promise I’ll be back again soon, as long as I manage to actually manage to get here again! Haha, at least my sense of humour is still working!

poetry, writing prompts

Creative Writing Prompts, Soon!

carolyncordon

Yes it’s true, a month’s worth of Creative Writing Prompts are starting tomorrow, the 1st of February! I jumped the gun a little yesterday, and the first prompt, which I will be showing on this blog tomorrow, the 1st of February, very much is to blame for the previous post. I was very excited and got mixed up with my days, yesterday. Under control again now though!

I’m going to explain it in a poem, which I’ll post on this blog site, for the big announcement tomorrow morning! There are no special prizes offered by me, not financial ones anyway. Connecting with other writers who love to write, and who also love to help others to write, that is a prize worth having, I say!

I am that writer and an informal teacher, and the thougth that other poets and writers may write some fantastic work, if they take part in any or all of these writing prompt challenges geiven here this month excites me and fills me with joy! So, if you love to write, or think you’re love to, then please log in here every day, if you can, see what the writing prompt for the day is, and write!

If you can’t log in every day, you can still take a look later, see what you think, and write when you have the time, and inclination. I’m going to try to write something new, in response to the prompts, every single day, and I hope I can write some fine poetry!

I hope the same thing for anyone else who takes part in this month of Prompts – together lets all make February Fabulous!

If you think ypu’d like to take part in this Fabulous Fun February, why not leave a comment here, and we can get to know a little bit about each other, and what, if anything, we wish to achieve.

I’ll get things started:

I am Carolyn Cordon, President of Adelaide Plains Poets, who meet every Thursday afternoon for a writing meeting, in a particular hotel in Gawler.

I have written and published eight books, three of them poetry collections, and I wish to have another, bigger poetry collection, later this year, or next year. (My most recent poetry collection was a chap book, with only 21 poems in it, all on one subject matter, and I plan for a larger and more broad-ranging collection for my next one.

I wrote my first decent poem in my early years of high school, then poetry fell off mostly, until I had a huge life challenge,and needed poetry again. After that, poetry and creative writing have taken over more and more of my life, and I love it!

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Your turn know, please leave your own message, telling your poetry story!

Uncategorized, Writing

Marketing Books, Some Previous Thoughts

carolyncordon

Dig It! Gardening Tips for Dogs

The link just above will give some information about marketing a self-published book. It isn’t the only way to market our books, it’s just information about how I did it. It may be useful, I hope it is interesting.

That information is ten years old, and while some things have changed, certainly other things remain the same. I am still doing small print runs of the book talked about, “Dig It! Gardening Tips for Dogs”. I have a soft spot for that book which I still send copies of, every now and then, in fact I sold another copy just a week ago, at an event I participated in.

For me, having books available if I am out and about at things where at least some of the people present, are open to the idea of buying books, is always a good idea. I in fact sold, not only Dig It!, at that event last weekend, but I also sold the two books that come after Dig It! I put the price down low, but I didn’t mind that at all. The person I sold the books to is a friend, she is a dog owner too, and I have already sold enough copies of the books to cover my costs, so any further sales are profit …

So if you go and look at the link above, which is also here, you’ll see that I was pretty laid back in my attitude to producing books. I am still more or less like that. I have moments when I chastise myself about missing out on sales, opportunities and so one, but really, the most important thing is that I’m not sending myself broke with my bookish things, and that I am having fun with what I do.

And isn’t that a key to living a book life? Having fun, having enough money to do what you want to do. I’ve sold more copies of this simple little book with illustrations, than many big name authors, published by actual publishing companies, I think. I’m not sure on that, unlike those publishing companies, I don’t have any accounting types of people collecting the numbers for me.

The book mentioned in the article I link to, the one that I published through Lulu, has pretty well disappeared from my life. I no longer know my log in details for my Lulu account, and I barely even remember what that book I wrote said. I could look it up, if I really cared, I supposed, but my level of interest in it has just disappeared.

Oh well, such is life!

 

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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