It seems I closed my eyes for just a moment, and when I opened them again ..  there it was .. gone! 😉

                                                         P O O F !

The first half of the first month of this new year has been used up already! And what, I wonder, did I do with my portion of it? There is not much I feel I have accomplished thus far.

In my last post I mentioned signing up for two writing challenges – #MOP for the whole month of January, and 12×12 in 2012 which is for the whole year.

M.O.P.

Since 2008, Month of Poetry has been coordinated by Australian poet and children’s author, Kat Apel. You can visit her here: http://katswhiskers.wordpress.com/ and check out #MOP here: http://monthofpoetry.wordpress.com/about/

Last year I participated in #MOP and fully enjoyed it, so this year I signed on again. Each day participants are to write a poem, anything at all (as long as it is child appropriate because there are even a few very young ones taking part, too), and post it to the board if wanting to share. The posting is not a requirement but in doing so it is inspiring and fun and helps draw ‘poets’ together in the sharing. This is not a competition, nor is it set up with prizes or anything. It is to encourage those who love to write poetry, opening up the possibilities and getting the creative poetic juices flowing.  Kat gives suggestions for improvement where necessary, as do other fellow writers, and it is a great way to learn as you go.

I have been finding it harder this year to write anything, including poetry, but I am still working at it. For today I wrote a poem about words. This little verse is the much simpler short verse I extricated from it before posting the more involved part of the poem to the board. I thought I’d share the orphaned part here as it just didn’t belong with the rest.

If you are a writer then you know what a love-hate relationship we can have with words. Sometimes they are sweet in one’s mouth and mind, sometimes the most difficult of partners, sometimes they amaze, sometimes they dismay, sometimes they are right there .. readily accessible, sometimes they just will not surface when wanted. This is the way it has been for me the past several months. A mixture of challenges but more difficult than easy. Even so, I believe that it is important that I write, perhaps only for my own sanity, but perhaps for something yet unknown down the road.

12×12 in 2012

This challenge – found here: http://writeupmylife.com/2011/11/30/12-x-12-in-2012-picture-book-writing-challenge/ – is headed up by Julie Hedlund. Check out her blog here: http://writeupmylife.com/

In Julie’s words: “write one picture book per month for each of the twelve months of 2012. This means a first draft: beginning, middle, end. NOT a submission-ready piece.”

Her idea came out of PiBoIdMo – Picture Book Idea Month – when she realized she still needed to do something with all her ideas. You can check out my December 8, 2011 post: http://bit.ly/rDpv8F regarding my efforts in November 2011, and if you are interested you can read through my November 2010 posts for more. Although I had come up with 44 ideas in 2010, I had not pulled together one manuscript (naughty me!), and with almost that many more this year I knew I had to do something with those to honour the pledge I’d made in signing up. Then along came 12×12 in 2012! (Thanks, Julie!)

You may wonder how I’m doing with that so far. Ummm, wellll … to be honest I have barely looked at my pages and pages of ideas, other than skimming them and selecting the ones I think have possibility, but I am going to try to get one story seriously worked on this month. And since there are only two weeks left I have to get a move on!

What are you doing with your goals so far this year?

If you are a writer, is your Muse keeping you busy?

Thanks for reading, and … Creative Musings! 🙂