Cataloging my one-a-day poems and some sad news

Now I am into week 41 of my write-a-poem-a-day-for-a-year I have realised that to track down certain poems is difficult because there is no record of what is in each week. I just have a folder with files numbered by week  so I have to search through each file to find what I want. I have in fact submitted a few poems, but the task of searching is becoming silly. So, today I decided to sort this. Not being a person with a liking for spreadsheets I have resorted to old fashioned pen and notebook. In fact I am using the one but last school exercise book once used by sons. This one is a Year 8 Spanish exercise book!  Once the used pages are ripped out there is plenty of paper left for the purpose. I have a few columns and enter by week the title of each poem written. At present the amount of ticks in the submitted column indicates how many times I've sent it out (where to is entered in another book). There aren't many ticks yet, but one is on it's third submission. This will help a great deal for now. I've written about half the year's poems in so far and noticed a few things, like how awful some of the titles are, and how I love some of the others, how some poems move on from the last written. I can also see by their titles around the time I wrote them in the year, the influences I had to write them. It's quite interesting. There are a mixture of quite silly things that will never see the light of day, a lot of climate stuff later on and I noticed a few poems ended up with titles I'd used already!

I came across some poems I'd forgotten about and were a nice surprise, some cringe-worthy, some laugh out loud and some deep stand out poems. I also realised that some weeks I had more than seven poems and a couple with only six poems (I did add to one to make up the seven, though I shall more than 365 poems when I've finished. That sounds a great deal, but possibly only a handful will be good enough to submit. However, there are others I will edit when I've finished if I think they are worth the effort, even if I have to re-write them.

This has been a useful exercise and the start of the next phase. I hope to have the remaining poems entered in the next few days, though of course I'm still writing, but I see the end of the tunnel now.

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Ollie making himself at home in the new cage

I have written about my son's pet rats before. Having failed to bond the rescue rats with Rizzo, it was time to buy a new cage for Charlie and Ollie. The temporary one was hard work. The doors opened inwards and frequently the hooks caught on clothing, it took two of us to clean and it wasn't easy to get the two boys out. The new cage is identical to Rizzo's and is just ideal. The two settled into their new home, and while we still tried bonding Rizzo with them, Charlie particularly would end up fighting with chunks of fur being pulled from Rizzo. It has been stressful for us to watch and while some fighting is normal we separated them many times to avoid anything worse. Rizzo seems very at home alone these days. I get him out in the mornings and we share breakfast. Well, he would steal my cereal, so I gave him his own breakfast of oats, soya cheese and a dollop of soya yogurt. Sometimes I'd add blueberries and carrot, but the soya products were pounced upon first! Often Rizzo comes out at night too. He appears to like whistling and my singing. He had a rendition of the Bee Gees Staying Alive the other morning!

Charlie

Charlie and Ollie have been out just together lately, but sadly little Charlie died on Friday. I found him lying in the bottom of the cage. There was no warning. He'd been out in the morning, taken food and seemed perky. So this was a bit of a shock. I don't know the cause. It could be related to his start in life, the infection he (and Ollie) had before they came here, or age, though he was only just over a year old (life span of a rat is around two years).

Because it was already dark when I found him we wrapped him in kitchen roll and put him in a small box and left it until the morning to bury him in the garden. I did what I did for the guineas pigs when they died....I put some food with him for the afterlife! (Me and my pagan/Christian ways! - I made a cross too).

Now Ollie is alone and wondering where his friend is. We are trying to lavish love on him. It's not good to have lone rats, but Ollie has always been the biter and aggressive one. I am not sure what we do. I can't see him accepting another rat. Oh, and he bit me on Sunday. Blood everywhere and the bite was tricky to stop bleeding. It's getting better now, though. I should have known better than to stroke him in his cage. Once he's out he is much better, but we are always wary. We are teaching him to go inside the pouch so we can lift him out of the cage. My son is very good (though he's been bitten three times!). Oh, the trials and tribulations of pet keeping!

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Finally, I had a nice surprise yesterday when the Brotherton Poetry Prize Anthology arrived in the post. I'd not won the prize or been a runner up. In fact I'm not in it at all, though I did enter. Maybe it was part of the entry to receive a free copy when published. Whatever, it was good to have a copy and see what I was up against. I guess I can see why I got nowhere! I've only read a few poems so far but I really liked the poems by the overall winner, Dane Holt, especially the first few. I think I've finally realised that these winning poets are in another league to me. I'm not sure how I will ever get to that level, perhaps never.

Admin....it has to be done sometime.

It's getting to that time of year when I look back on my writing achievements. But that's for another post because this morning I took time to rearrange (yet again) my poetry into two folders. Having spent ages putting poems into alphabetical order with notes about submissions (if and when they were published, their progress etc.) last year - or was it early this year? I have found that it isn't really working. So now I have taken out all those that have been published and put them together (still in order) in one of the folders which also contains my 'small stones' poems and a bunch of rough drafts. All the unpublished poetry is in the other folder.

This has helped in several ways. Firstly I can see how few are published (sigh) and see how many poems are sitting in the other folder going nowhere. Yes, a fair few of them are 'out' and I am waiting to see if they might make it to the other file but there are many others lingering! Some poems have never been sent anywhere while others have been submitted several times. This got me thinking. Do the ones I never send out stay there because I'm not happy with them? And if so, why am I not editing them?  A lot to ponder on. I looked at some I have never submitted. Some do have notes about re-editing, others have no notes and some have some handwritten edits on them. I immediately thought what a waste. If some are that bad perhaps I should just abandon them. But I hate doing that unless they really are rubbish (I admitted that one or two might fall into that category).

I set about looking more carefully at a few and began to see what needed doing. My poetry has come a long way since I wrote some of the poems but a good edit might do it. In fact I have made a start and am determined to resurrect some of these and get them sent out - ah a new goal for next year!

I've also been remiss in updating the results of submissions. I do keep a main book which is up to date but I often fail to follow this up in the folders. I also realised that in the last few months I have written quite a lot of new poems, including a whole sequence. None of these are in the folder, including the ones recently sent out. Admittedly I have had a busy year but it's to my advantage to keep up with this.

Certainly this has been an exercise worth tackling. I've been meaning to do it for ages and it has opened my eyes to the poems I have and the potential within in them.

So I've catalogued...now I've analyised my collection

Project complete - Files full of poems

I've finally finished sorting all my poetry and filed it all away. I now have two A4 files with a mixture of published and unpublished poems. I have thought about putting all the published ones in a separate file but right now I can't face any more!

This was a very enlightening exercise and several things came to light. I devised a crude analysis sheet and spent the evening finding the answers. Here are some things I found:

• The first poem I had published was in 1996, however when I was much younger I had a poem published in True Romances magazine (I used love those - strange how your taste changes as you grow older!). Somewhere I have the cutting.
• I have had approximately fifty-seven poems published. If that sounds a lot I have to admit that in the first few years of publication it was through a magazine I would not use now and the anthologies were vanity type but I knew no different then. The quality of my poetry then was not great but they still published them! Broken down more I'd say that at a guess the first twenty-six poems published fell into that category!
• I have had ten competition wins, three firsts, five second and two third prizes, plus a highly commended. Of these I am most proud of the latest one - The New Writer Prose & Poetry Awards which was a second prize. Most of my wins were through minor small press competitions but none the less I was excited about them and they are confidence builders and we all have to start somewhere.
• I've appeared in eleven anthologies, but several of those were the vanity type, but not the more recent ones. 
• I've had six poems translated, most of which have been published previously.
• I have been most frequently published in
  Areopagus, a Christian writer's magazine. It is a small press magazine in which I am regularly published and is a niche market. I've subscribed for many years and the Christian market gave me my first breaks.
• The most used letter to start a title in my poetry is T (in a big way!)
• The least letter used to start a title in my poetry is evenly spread - one each for q, u, y and z (that's got you wondering!)

What stood out most as I was going through everything was how much my writing has changed and improved, which is good to know! I look at the early stuff and am almost embarrassed. Over all these years I've often wondered whether I was wasting my time and now I know that I should keep going. It's certainly been a long haul and I still have dreams and goals. Maybe I will never realised them fully but I will keep on trying and hopefully my writing will also keep on improving.

Looking through my poems I came across quite a few, what I call 'nice poems'. They will never win me prizes but I'm not sure I want to take them apart either as I like them as they are. I also found lots of poems in the 'almost ready' stage and lots of first drafts. Seeing them on paper rather than in a compute file where I skip over them, I realise that there is lots of material to work with. This morning I was flicking through a few and began editing a couple.

I am so glad to have finally done this exercise for many reasons but mainly to see how far I have come...slowly but surely.

Now on to the next project......

Keeping track of the runners!

Current system of keeping note!

I've started cataloging my poetry at long last. The current system where I write things down in a book as I send them out and then make notes about whether it was accepted or rejected  is becoming a nightmare. The book goes back to 1991 with big gaps when I wasn't writing and includes stories, articles, letters and flash fiction. The trouble is that now I am writing more and re-submitting poems it's getting harder to keep tabs on it, like where the piece has been before.

How do others file their submissions? Maybe there is no one way and a few years ago this didn't matter as much. Hubby says put it all on a spreadsheet but I hate spreadsheets and I like to have something NOT on a computer to refer to. All my poetry is on computer of course but not where it goes. Anyway I have a file now and have a master sheet I use for each poem which includes title, whether published, where and when. Also I have included space for writing down the different places I have sent it to and whether it was rejected/accepted as well as space for the poem itself. I am already running out of room in the file and I have only just finished poems beginning with the letter 'M'.

I also have some early drafts which I am putting in the back of the file and there's a section for my 'small stone' poetry.

The experience is quite interesting because I can see how my writing has developed and improved over the years. Also other strange things come up.....like I have masses of poems with titles falling into the A-C category (I know there will be tons when I get to 'T'!). When I trawl though poems on my computer looking for something I often skip things because I think I know which poems they are. Well, obviously not! I've found things I'd forgotten about that need just a little work and I can submit. Having the file will enable me to browse through things and pick out something to work on easier that I would on the computer. My only question is why didn't I do this before?

The new file

I also know that I have poems on  a memory stick.....really old stuff, most of which I think I do have hard copies of, but many of those could do with editing. Maybe one day I'll get round to those. Then of course there is all the handwritten stuff, some is on computer but some not. This might take a LONG time to fully complete but it's well worth doing.

When this main part is finished I shall analyse my findings. I'm sure that will fun. For now I'm almost out of paper so I'll have to leave it until I can get to Tesco for some more.

Meanwhile the....novel....is going okay. I think I lost my way a bit last week and when I come to edit I may have to cut some chunks but they stay for now. I've had a good run the last two days but I need to think through the next section. As I'm away next weekend work will probably slow down anyway. I have never worked so hard at writing-related stuff before but there is satisfaction in spending so much time on it. I'm finding it very productive in more ways than one.

HAPPY EASTER.....don't overdo the chocolate!