Turquoise Monster

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.

I have create an audio book / album of various festive stuff – so that is poems from The Little Book of Festive Poetry, a story about a little mouse called Percival’s Christmas Wish and a song, not to mention some actual sleigh bells!

Unfortunately Bandcamp have decided the song is the main thing about it so everything is sort of stuck on that so if you just press play it will play the song and the end credits and miss the poetry and story out! I can’t work out how to stop that happening, I will try, but for now just click the arrows to take you back to the first track of the album. You can listen for free but download costs £3 which goes to buy books for my little girls school library.

Hope you enjoy it 🙂

Also tomorrow night (Fri 7th Dec 2012) I shall be performing as part of the Cirencester Festive Slam!

Well ok not quiet yet but with two weddings to attend and the presents only half knitted I need to think Christmassy. Also I wanted to try and get all the hard graft for The Little Book of Festive Poetry sorted. I was going to leave the audio version until next year but I’ve built momentum on the project now and Jean loves it so much… and with the weekend disappointment I need to keep it going or I think I would just give it up.

So this morning I composed a song whilst baby snuggling and recorded whilst she napped. Here it is 🙂

The Little Books are going out there into the void of the internet and as physical objects to share but the reason they exist at all is for Jean and latter Mary once she appeared. I need to finish recording the poems, edit the story and record that and add some slay bells and then the album will be ready 🙂 I may even have a little looky at producing some merchandise for it via the bandcamp site (I think they do a POD type thing and my Cafe Press Shop).

The Little Books are covered more on Orange Monster which is my Childrens books and Illustrations blog.

So yesterday I did the village craft fayre all profits were for charity and yet it was the worst one I have ever done. It was slow – all of them are being slow at the moment but something else was going on, people were still buying the odd bit from the other stalls. Now I had Little Books of Poetry and art prints for sale rather than my normal stuff (which I’d given up as it wasn’t selling) but it was not that change that was the issue, others were selling prints.

I watched the girl across from me sell pretty much all of her hare prints. They were lovely and she was lovely but I find that sort of thing boring especially since moving here to the Cotswolds as there are hare pictures EVERYWHERE. But people bought those. (And I bought some of her buttons as I loved the style she had done on them but the ones I liked were the ones that were left on her stall at the end).

People bought chutneys that I would never buy as I make my own and they bought ceramics and they bought fluffy hedgehogs from the hedgehog hospital stall but I sold one little book and that was to somebody who already had one. My science-art prints were looked on in horror by some with comments about them being creepy or scary. And then when asked what the actual pictures were done in I got sneers over ‘fine liner’ and as for my felt tip pictures such as Creativity and The Little Book illustrations… people kept asking if they were Jean’s work.

And yes I have imitated children’s drawings for the The Little Books but not drawn them childishly. The cat in the christmas tree was harder to draw than my space montage. I didn’t think I really cared about what people thought of my art anymore but having it thought of as something a child could do upset me – this is in contrast with the reaction I had at the Tate Modern to a book that entitled Why Your Five Year Old Could Not Have Done That. My objection to it was that it felt children could not think the deep thoughts behind the art and yet I know Jean can and she had already won prizes for art works by the time she was five – the issue is that she does not yet have the dexterity and refinement for the finished piece but the ideas, the concepts are there.

To be fair it was said by people who know Jean but still…

I would feel completely crushed except two things came out of this a) I came to the conclusion that I am not mainstream, I can do fine art I choose not to I have my own style and yes it is not most peoples thing, b) Kids picked up the Little Book and read them avidly – the target audience loves them but unfortunately they do not have the ability to buy things themselves it is the parents who need to do that. So now the problem is how to get them to buy rather than the style of the book being wrong. I also ended up letting kids colour in my trilobite prints that went wrong at the printers – these are just line art and it was a keep my kids occupied thing but Jean’s friends kept coming and joining and in the end I ran out of them! This has given me the want to produce a colouring book.

I also met some amazing artists, only one of which had a website but I think they live next do to each other.

I loved her camera man!

The other issue is that I need to make sure that people know the business cards are for taken as I had a number of people try to buy them! Go Moo.com.

So I am taking along copies of The Little Book of Festive Poetry to the Cranham Craft Fayre on Sunday the 25th Nov 2012! 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.

Stars glowing bright
In plasma
Painting the cosmos
Elements birthed

Stella death pangs
Condensing down
Forming the new
Glowing bright