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Friday 20 December 2013

Ending the year on a high

Well, it's nice to end the year on a high - I've just heard that I am runner up in a local libraries poetry competition.  There is to a presentation in January when they would like me to read my poem. My prize is £30 worth of book tokens (YES!).

I've never read in front of an audience before but have decided to leave worrying about it until after Christmas.  I'm still trying to take it all in.

Tuesday 3 December 2013

What next?

I had an email recently saying thanks for entering their competition but I couldn't remember sending anything! I had to look back through all my entries for the year and there it was back in March. No wonder I couldn't remember.  I have no idea why I sent it so early, very unusual for me. Actually, why did they wait so long to thank me?  Hummm!

The online poetry feedback course with The Poetry School has now ended.  It was useful to see where I can improve the poems I contributed and I really admired others contributions. There were some very good poets in the group. We all started off a bit gingerly but each week the poems just got better.  There were some amazing poems. I'm a bit relieved it's finished though as giving feeding back on so many poems was very time consuming and I'm not that good at it! Good practice though.

I'm not sure where I am going next. I've not signed up for any new courses and what I'm thinking is maybe to do more editing of poems I have to try and improve them. I want to take time to read more. I'd like to take a break from writing for a while and then just mess around with words - no thinking about publication and deadlines. I do still have a story to edit and I still can't seem to motivate myself to start.

I'm not going to make any decisions now. Christmas is coming up with lots of other things needing my time and I find I get stressed even when I think I'm not! So some time out will be good. I'll review things in the new year.