A Poem A Day and Blogging

If you had told me six months ago that I could write a decent draft of a poem a day, I would have said maybe as a fluke, but never regularly. I've always written very slowly, shaping and tinkering, but my recent online writing courses have taught me to trust my instinct and to just dive in to my writing.  Keeping writing practice as a daily activity helps to make it possible, like keeping the writing muscles limber. I've turned about 10 out of the 17 non-course prompts I've done into poems, some still pretty rough drafts, but some already submitted to magazines.

I'm finding my prompts from various places: newspaper articles and books I'm reading, places I'm at, websites that have daily prompts. I like to have someone else pick my prompts as otherwise I try to find ones that fit my preconceived ideas about what I should write about. I prefer when surprises appear in my writing. 

Reoccuring themes have been showing up, often to do with Scotland. I'm debating whether I want to add the poems I've written to my Scottish collection as they are part of the themes there, but while they're still being considered by publishers I'll just leave them. 

The poet Luisa A Igloria has been an inspiration in my daily writing. She has written and posted daily poems for over 8 years. She shares them on the Via Negativa blog which she shares with Dave Bonta who also writes daily. And while I'm sure she finds that not every one is good or worthy of publication, she has managed to produce four full length collection and 3 chapbooks and has won lots of awards in that time so it can be worth-while to write daily. I now have enough for at least one more collection after my Scottish and Finnish ones, but there's no obvious thematic flow so I'm not trying to put anything together right now.

Dave Bonta also does a weekly round-up of the Poet Bloggers Revival which I joined up. I'm not included in his round-up, but it's nice to read briefly what other bloggers are writing about and sometimes follow back to the original blog for more. It's interesting how he can often find themes stretching across the world to various poets. 

I'm quite chuffed that I've managed to keep up my weekly blogging this year. I might have missed one or two when on holiday, but otherwise, even when I was feeling quite low, I managed to write something. It gave me a goal to achieve, something to feel like I was still writing even when I couldn't produce a poem or a line of fiction. 

Less than two weeks before the kids finish for Christmas, so hopefully I can keep things going in that time and then ease down for the break. Take care.