MUTES
So foul and fair a day I have not seen… Scything rain kicked along by a blustery wind all night and most of the day. Now in the afternoon, bright sun but with huge bruised clouds rolling up behind. One of my fellow playground mums tells me that the family is going camping in Gloucestershire at the weekend. At least I’m promised a little schadenfreude in the warmth of my sitting room, then.
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Ancient Lights is nearly ready. Beth’s received the first hardback. Now the paperbacks are being printed and we hope to be able to declare publication for May 1st. Exciting and rewarding after years of flocks of offerings coming home to roost. But I must embroider onto my inner sampler the words of archy and mehitabel author Don Marquis: ‘Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo’.
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I wrote recently of my continued blogging; of the way in which momentum alone seems to maintain the process long after the peak of writer commitment and reader response has passed. I note with some surprise that there’s a 13-day gap between the previous post and this one where once I was posting every day, which is a little sad. I regret too that the blog has become little more than a forum for the road testing of poems rather than presenting an alternation of prose and verse, as used to be the case.
But all is change. These hefty ocean-going blogs continue to give way to the smaller, swifter craft. Although the microblog and Twitter hold little appeal for me, I seem to spend much more time chatting on Facebook than I do hauling sail over here so I guess I’m evolving (albeit sluggishly) along with the general trends in social media. That having been said, I’ve dumped my short-lived Tumblr blog. I couldn’t get it to format as I wanted and hand washing on the part of the Tumblr techies and my primitive coding savvy took away most of the charm and all of the functionality.
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MAISIE AND EMMA
