Tag: Nature

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!

Writing

Which Story To Write?

carolyncordon

I have a friend, a member of my weekly writing group, who is working on, I think she said, ten novels at the same time. She is a dedicated writer, and I am so impressed by her output, in both quality and quantity. She writes historical fiction, and more contemporary fiction, as well as a smaller amount of non-fiction. I am in awe of her, I’m not sure is she realises that …

I can’t imagine having that many ‘works in progress’, going at the same time. I work at a crazy mixed up, slap-dash kind of pace, and feel unable to commit myself, and my concentrated time, in the same way as my friend. That being said though, I have managed to write and either publish, or have published, seven books since my first one, about fourteen years ago.

My most recently published book “Dog Buddha’s Thoughts”, which I self-published last year, is the last in a series of three books, written in the point of view of a made up dog, Buster the Dog, and I don’t think I am going to write another book in that series. I feel like that book from last year said all I had to say. But the thing about books and writing, is that inspiration can come from a wide variety of places, so really, who knows?

At the moment though, I don’t feel at all committed to writing another “Buster the Dog” book, but Buster is always there somewhere in my head, so who knows. I keep my mind open to new ideas, always! I have other, more sensible ideas for stories that may become books though, and I am much more interested in those. One is a book for the 10-14 year old reader, and it involves, amongst other things, unicorns.

Unicorns have been in my life since I was around the same age as my imagined readers for this book, and I’m certainly excited about getting that book out. It’s a positive book, about a young girl growing up and learning about herself, what she is capable of, and how her life may be as she gets older. It is set in a district based in part on the region where I live, which is also the region of a made up place, I have set another book I’m currently working on.

This particular book is a novel, with intrigue, murder, politics, and is a bit of a love story. It is slowly creeping into existence, with me adding another paragraph or two every week. As I said, ‘slowly creeping’! I don’t know if I’m going to ever finish this one. I know it will need to be at least 65,000 pages, but at the moment, after a couple of years since I began it, there are perhaps 12,000 words.

With this book, I have paragraphs in notebooks, and devices all over the place, and I don’t know whether I’ll actually be able to even find everything I’ve already written of this book-in-progress. I think if I was really committed to this particular novel, I would have got far more organised with it by now, but haven’t really done much about it at all. I think that tells me the truth about it. I still have my main characters in my head, but not so much on the page. I suspect Meredith may never come out into the world …

I’ve enjoyed writing the snippets I’ve written in response to prompts from someone in my writing group, and I definitely feel that all writing is good practice. So, if that’s true, I’m not wasting my time with this novel-in-progress, I’m in fact learning more about how to write a novel, so that when a novel I feel I must write comes along, I will be ready to do it justice.

I hope anyone reading this has found it interesting, and I would love to read about your own writing process! Feel free to leave a comment here!

Uncategorized, Writing

Matsuo Bashō | The Art of the Haiku — Art Subtext

carolyncordon

An analysis of the haiku of Matsuo Bashō.

via Matsuo Bashō | The Art of the Haiku — Art Subtext

I too write Haiku at times, and I often sit out on my back veranda, looking at the clouds, the grass, the trees, the birds, and I think on Nature. Sometimes small, haiku style poems come from such contemplation.

Other times no such writing may come from it, in terms of the writing of poetry, but such peaceful contemplation is a good thing in itself, calming and stress free, bliss … Anything that can bring feelings such as these into your life, that is surely a good thing? Life is good, or at least should be, yes? Yes.

Haiku written when paying attention only to the ‘rules’ is not the best way to go. It can lead to an understanding, but paying attention to Nature, rather than rules, that is the way to gain a deeper understanding of what haiku can be.