How to lose a poem.

Alright, so that’s the end of the blog. I’ve been published. Cheers, have fun!

...

A joke, but let me clarify. I received my first acceptance letter this week. A poem I wrote, ‘Salutations’, is going to be printed in the Seeds of Inspiration poetry anthology later this year. Which is good fun, and I was pretty stoked to hear about it. Only, if I may confess something...

I didn’t remember sending it off. I didn’t remember which poem it was. I didn’t even know if it was mine.

When I received the letter it had the poem’s final proof attached. Which was handy as I didn’t fancy waiting until the book was produced before finding out what my contribution was. I remembered that I wrote it in 2009 as a challenge to someone who said most of my prose was ‘too wordy’. By that she meant I usually write in one big paragraph. I didn’t really pay much attention to pentameter or form or style. I just wrote stuff down and that was it. So I did this poem in a regular rhyming couplet format thing, and a couple of years later saw this poetry competition. After a minor revision, off it went.

(Something I found funny: I wrote it in Ireland, sent it off to United Press whilst in Vietnam, received the acceptance letter in Norway and will be printed as an English author. Tee-hee.)

Anyway, so I’m being published for the first time. What the purpose of this blog is, though, is to have a novel published. So while it’s a nice addition to my CV, and I am genuinely pleased, the mission continues!

I’ve decided to work on a new long story whilst waiting for the second draft. I’d toyed with the idea of laying it off until I was completely done with the novel I have now, but this is the first new idea I’ve been really excited about in a couple of years so I’m just going to hammer it onto the page and sort it all out at a later date. It won’t be so much a second draft when I come back to it as a big jumble of vaguely connected words. The new story includes the following; forest nymphs, twin worlds, Armageddon, sex, drugs & heavy metal... and lots of profanity. I’m of the belief that if I am going to draw from my own experiences, I have to be honest – with language, growing up in Grays around the ages of 18 to 21, everyone I fucking knew swore.

I’ve written about five thousand words so far messing around and it’s been lots of fun. I like the idea of merging the real world I grew up in and the kind of fantasy world I enjoy reading about. The result with be marketable to few people, I think, but it’s definitely a story I’m writing for my own interests. As the story runs in my head it seems too full-on for the young adult genre – I haven’t seen much drug use and utterings of the C word in the works I’ve read – and too fairy-filled for people who like stories of fucking and fighting. I also plan to have a lot of Iron Maiden in it for shits and giggles. So it’ll fall somewhere in the middle, I suppose. We’ll see.

Haha – As I’m writing this someone on Facebook said it sounds like an episode of Supernatural. Brilliant. I can promise now that in my head it isn’t much like that. Though I fully endorse the suggestion!

I’m no longer at the cabin, and am back in Arendal. I’ve got a few weeks to go before I visit home and see my excellent friends. Looking forward to a bit of a catch-up. Apologies if this entry is a bit all over the place. I’m quite sure I’ve drunk at least two too many cups of coffee.