Today I’m giving a lesson on Sounds in Poetry over at the Tyler Public Library at 1pm in the Makerspace (behind the computer lab on the third floor). But don’t let that scare you away if you’re not a poet. I’m covering poetry, a little bit about songwriting, and how to use lyricism in your prose as well.
Hope to see you there!
I know, I know…you almost forgot I worked here. I have the usual excuses, all tied up with string, sitting under a cat somewhere. Last year was a doozy of a year, filled with all manner of distractions, procrastinations, and other sundry explosions of my life.
I’ve spent the last couple of days thinking about what my writing goals are for this year. One is to make my usual chart of what all I wrote last year, but that isn’t done yet because the transcribing isn’t done. So no numbers today. Maybe tomorrow. After I’ve written, of course.
I’m on the schedule with an editor for September, so my big goal is to finish the latest draft of my big epic fantasy novel and polish it up. This is the novel y’all have heard me refer to as Caro’s Quest in the past. I still need a better name for it, but that will come. 🙂
Smaller goals include finding homes for my poetry and short stories, finishing putting together my first poetry anthology, finishing my research on the best time to release it, and then publishing that anthology. I’m aiming for sending off at least one poem and one short story a week. We’ll see if that’s a manageable goal as time goes on and reassess after the first quarter is over.
I’m no longer on the board for the East Texas Writing Guild, nor my UU church board. Those were positive decisions for me, based on me needing more time to write. I’m continuing on as a moderator for the Open Door Writing Group at the Tyler Public Library for the foreseeable future, which means writing and giving a presentation for a monthly lesson about writing.
That’s about it, y’all. It’s my first day back at the writing desk. I’m planning on starting off all my weekdays from here on out at my writing desk, working on stories or poetry for the first half of every day before moving on to social media, lesson writing, and marketing in the afternoons.
Yay 2025! I hope this year will be so much better than the last. 🙂
This month, I managed 17,967, but 2/3 of it was lessons for the ODWG. I also tried to train a new membership chair for one of my local writing groups.
I wrote one really long poem about teeth. No, really. It started off about teeth and then it got weird. I also wrote a poem about grief that involved Pokemon. You know you want to read that one. (There were several other poems this month as well, but those were my favorites).
I also was the featured speaker of the month for my local writers guild. I spoke on “How to Get Back on Track After Life’s Disasters.”
In real life, I had to figure out how to do my local church’s annual certification because our board president’s life exploded that week. I attended the first of hopefully many delightful meetings of a local yarn group. I loom-knitted one sock and then tried to figure out how to regular knit it’s partner after my sock loom broke. I started a crocheted snowflake blanket.
I also spoke at two other groups, using the “How to Get Back on Track…” lesson as a starting point. Which was only funny because disasters kept making it so I almost didn’t get to speak at either group (first an epic hail storm and then a mass internet outage).
I also read The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammet.
This month, I eked out 8,749 words, but a lot of it was poetry, so when I think about it that way, that’s a LOT.
I prepared and presented two lessons at ODWG. I also worked some more on the Lake House Mystery and made a whole new system for tracking my poetry and short story submissions.
I also rearranged my entire writing studio again because it turned out that one of my bookshelves could not stand up without the support of the two on either side and books were everywhere.
In real life, one of my kids had an MRI for migraines and also sliced open his foot badly, all in one month. My dad visited for a long while. I started crocheting the Pineapple Peacock shawl, took it apart and restarted it twice more, then finally gave up. Knitted a scarf for my spouse instead.
We had a polar vortex hit and had several “ice days” I started reading “Barbara and Susan Talk About Empty Nests” once a week as a kind of devotional for therapy homework. I also read “Shadow and Bone” and “Lessons in Chemistry”.
I honestly wasn’t expecting all the pieces I sold last year to come out all in the same week. They originally had publication dates that gave me a few weeks of breathing room in between each one, but one came out later and another one sooner and BAM, here they all are. So thank you for being patient with all my posts being about these books for sale. And thank you for supporting me and my writing for so long. Y’all are the best!
Now on to the books. One came out earlier last week and one came out today and the last one will be out tomorrow, but I was just too excited to wait. Here are links for the first two, along with a little description of what to expect from my piece in each book:
This book has my poem “Last Family Vacation” on page 116, which is a peek into the heart of a mom with a kid in his senior year of high school. 🙂
This book has my essay “Revealing Rainbows” on page 74, which is a more in depth personal look at encouraging not just my sons to be themselves, but all the other boys they know as well.
Another exciting announcement for the week! The anthology who took my poem “The Last Family Vacation” just announced the cover graphic and told us that April 2022 will be the publication month. 🙂
Lisa Holcomb 