Turquoise Monster

Yesterday I did not follow the writing exercises for WoPoWriMo instead I went into Cheltenham and meet up with some other fellow WoPos and gave out stickers and postcards. Then I went on to Centre Arts a local art gallery and workshop centre which I love. They hold an arts cafe every Saturday afternoon.

This was the first one I made it along to. I sat and chatted to artists and knitters and writers and looked at the paintings and drank tea and coffee and eat cookies and wrote poems.

I actually penned about 10 in the end which was amazing though I would say that I am experimenting with the shorter type of poem once again.

It was a very productive day and I recommend trying to find something similar in an area near you if you are a poet.

One raw Wopo poem

Creativity burns
Within
A fire
Inspiration lit
Skill built
Fuelled by ideas
Sending concepts
To the stars

This is the web-badge for WoPoWriMo and yes it is one of my drawings 🙂 I am still trying to write my poem so you may well be getting it tomorrow – I have decided to post something on here each day during the challenge but obviously this means the poems are going to be raw and not edited so sorry about that!

I am once again taking part in the February poetry writing challenge WoPoWriMo. After a successful MoP in January I am hopeful for this challenge but I am also running the site for them again this year so may find it a bit of a stretch!

Unlike MoP I am going to be sticking to the prompts which I haven’t done since the first year! This year is WoPo’s fifth birthday which seems nuts but there you go.

Wish me luck 🙂

I already have 48 poems – some very rough, others less so and all dark and twisted and fitting with the gothic theme so I am very happy 🙂

They will steadily be appearing on Black Monster.

Yet again this year I failed to actually sign up to the site :/ But as the poems were of a darker nature I felt that they wouldn’t have been appropriate for their area for posting poems anyway.

Later this year I hope to tie the poems in with a similar set of flash fictions and maybe a novelette.

January is always Month of Poetry as started by Kathryn Apel. The idea like most poem a day challenges is to write a poem each and everyday. I like to up the stakes a bit generally and am going for an hour spent on poetry each day instead.

Now it is 11 days into January and I have been very busy sorting poetic stuff out and writing a series of Gothic Poems for my Black Monster blog.

I like writing dark and twisted verse more suited to the Romantic era but am also very aware that there is little room for getting it published. But that does not matter I shall build them up into my own collection.

I am planning to stat submitting more poetry, I had a good success rate last year but I also submitted only a few pieces and I want to up that. I decided once before that I was bored with submitting so stopped and started this blog but I feel ready to start again. The issue I had was trying to keep tabs on who had what copy right and so on and also I simply was not producing the volume of poetry I am these days – this can be seen as a good and a bad thing!

So that is number one.

Number two is sorting this blog out – it’s been spam attacked, I have posts that have never gone live from events and things which I will back blog and so on…

Number three is to sort out my own poetry collections. These currently stand at:

Ballads of the Scientifica

Turquoise Monsters Poetry Collection

The Doomsday Collection

The Political Converse

Without and Within

And…

The Little Books of Poetry – of which the main focus will be:

1) The Little Book of Festive Poetry

2) The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry

3) The Little Book of Easter Poetry

Apart from this lot I am going to be attempting to do more performances and attending workshops and things by various local groups.

So I am taking along copies of The Little Book of Festive Poetry to the Cranham Craft Fayre tomorrow! I will sign them if asked and profit goes to buy the school new books for their library. Its on from 10 – 4 and I will also have copies of Running to Stand Still an audio play by Barnaby Eaton-Jones to raise money for ME research and awareness.

There will also be my poetry cards and some prints of my art work.

Well it’s been a busy busy old year here and I am looking forward to some down time for the holidays – hope to do some great stuff in the new year 🙂

And for now I have poetry to read to kids about Santa and mice and the such like 🙂

Merry Christmas!

To celebrate the changing of an age, the beginning of the new age I decided to group together some of my flash fictions, short stories and poems about worlds changing, rearranging, ending and beginning. It is a dark, twisted collection with a remnant of hope within. It is by no means my entire collection of these works as there simply was not time to collate them all!

The collection stands at novella size and I may do an extended version later on.

It is grown ups only I am afraid.

Free at the moment especially for the Mayan prediction of a change of the ages 🙂 Just click the title below for a PDF. It is dedicated to friends that left this world too soon.

I hope you enjoy it.