Tag: picture book

Writing

New Month, New Challenges

carolyncordon

So Summer is now over, according to the calendar, and it is now Autumn, in the Southern Hemisphere. In South Australia, particularly in Adelaide and further north, Summer is very much still here, with an awful day out there today – forty degrees and humid with it. Hot and sticky is never great, in terms of weather.

But it’s a new month, I’m inside, and the air conditioner is on in our lounge room, so it’s much cooler than it is outside. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it here or not, but another of my writing related tasks is to be the Editor of the Mallala Crossroad Chronicle. This is a newsletter that is distributed around the town of Mallala, and a couple of other towns nearby (Two Wells to the Library, and Gawler to the P/A Hotel).

The copies delivered are printed in black and white (by the lovely people at Senator Alex Gallagher’s office), but the copy is available to be viewed in colour at the Facebook page Mallala Crossroad Chronicle. Click on the link, and you can download this most recent one, and many of the earlier issues. Things almost always look better in colour, don’t they?

So, being the Editor of this newsletter isn’t my New Challenge, but it’s sort of relevant. A couple of my friends, who are also members of Adelaide Plains Poets (a group of which I am President), these lovely people help me with the Chronicle, by giving me articles to publish in the Chronicle, and I absolutely love the idea that I am helping them to get their words ‘out there’, while they are helping me, by adding interesting things that are quite different to the usual community group things. I love these kinds of win/win situations!

And further sharing the love to my writing group, and relating to my new challenge, I brought several copies of the text of a picture book I have written, with a view to getting feedback about it. My work was praised, and one of those present gave me some excellent feedback, which I have utilised, and made adjustments to the words, accordingly. So thank you Michelle K, when I get this book published, you are definitely getting a free copy!

Putting together a community newsletter is a slightly messy, sometimes fraught, but always satisfying thing, but if you know what you are doing (which I do), then you can get it done, month after month after month. Getting a picture book published, that is a very different thing indeed.

I have tried to do this a few times, with a couple of different stories, and received only rejections, lots of them. So do I really want to put myself through that again? Well of course I do, rejection slip/lettersĀ  – they’re par for the course, if you want to get a book of any kind published …

My little picture book is set in Australia, and it has a theme of the importance of friends. I can almost see the book in my mind, and I love it! I hope I can find a picture book publisher now, one who will love my little book too! Michelle thinks my book is suitable for the 0-3 range of ‘readers’. I’d put it at 2-4, I think. Anyway, I’ll start sending it out, and see how things go.

poetry

Tanka & Other Japanese Forms

carolyncordon

I was pleased today, to see that the poetry prompt for the #poemadayfeb event was the Tanka form of poetry. I have spent many years trying to perfect the writing of Haiku, and the similar style of Tanka, and am still trying to perfect them.

I suspect this will continue for the rest of my life, knowing that managing to write one good one, certainly does not mean you’ve ‘got it’! In my life, I think I’ve written a mere handful of fine Haiku, and I’m not sure I’ve every written a Tanka I would call fine …

But today, I am going to do my best at writing a good Tanka, because I’d like the poems I put up here to be all good poems, of various forms, and following the various given prompts for February 2019. A Tanka has a syllable count of 5/7/5/7/7 syllables, or fewer, and a Haiku has a syllable count of 5/7/5 syllables, or fewer. There is a lot more to these poetic forms, but that would be for another blog post …

This has been a wonderful month for me, I feel my poetry is really getting to a higher level, to some extent, and I am ever so grateful to Kathy Parker, Paul Kohn, and Laura Greaves for putting these words together for poets to use as prompts. The more I write poetry, the better I feel I am getting, and the more inspired I am feeling about my writing in general.

Yesterday I wrote my #poemadayfeb poem, and another poem, and the text for a picture book too, all in one inspired day. I don’t know if that picture book will ever become an actual book, but I like it, it’s a sweet little story about friendship, and I’m wishing I could draw well enough, to finish it off!

I’m going to have a bit of a go at doing illustrations for this picture book, just to see how it would look, and whether it might work. That’s a task for me, after I finish this blog post, by posting the Tanka I have now finished writing. It is based on what I heard this morning, and what I remember from other times. I’ve written it down here, and fiddled with it for about ten minutes, still not completely happy, but happier than I was, so it will have to do.

That’s the thing with writing, there’s still something else you might do to make it better, but editing has to stop somewhere if others are going to read your work, and having written that, here it is:

Tanka for the 18th of February, 2019
________________________

Gentle breeze blowing,

wind chimes, and sparrow song,

bring peaceful moments,

before my husband brings home

a cacophony of sound …