Dear Readers,
I know this is late, but everything is in transition as I learn what I’m doing and want to do.
I started this project on January the 12th with the initial goal of looking for trending topics to write about daily. What I quickly found is that news and trending things were either redundant, things I didn’t know anything about, or things that I didn’t care about. These were really hard to draw inspiration from or to get excited about. Despite that, for the first couple of weeks I stuck with the original goal of writing on trending topics before branching out into finding inspiration elsewhere. Eventually I turned to inspiration from life, history, writing prompts, reading, and imagination.
Pushing through the initial several weeks with the goal of writing on the trending topics I think helped me find the motivation to keep going after the initial intention of the project fizzled out.
As any artist, I want to give trite advice like “Write every day!” like everyone else extolls, but that wasn’t my truth, so no point of lying about it.
I found that I’m more of a write when the muse is in a generous and giving mood. When I can get ahead from writing multiple poems a day it’s awesome. It gives some breathing room, and for me, some more freedom when I think on what I want to write next. In my mind, if you exceed your goals, we shouldn’t beat ourselves up if we miss them one day, especially if we have a lead on them.
The second lesson I found was supporting the write even when you don’t feel like it. With a goal of publishing a daily poem, I regularly find myself in this situation. When the well is dry and I don’t have anything to write about, I still force myself to write and produce the daily poem. Somewhere Hemingway’s quote (which I’m going to bastadrized) echoes in my head, “Write 99 pages of crap, so you end up with 1 decent one.” I figure with 365 chances, I have at least 3.5 good poems that I’ll produce along the way.
The top poems for January reflect the grab bag of initiation of the project with a mix between inspiration poems, news based poems, and the experimental poems.
| 1. | Lonely Gallery |
| 2. | Ghazal Mask |
| 3. | Sequoia Snow |
| 4. | Comma Haiku |
| 5. | Rain City |
| 6. | Emerald City |
| 7. | Perfect Union |
| 8. | Disturbed Snow |
| 9. | Reconstruction |
| 10. | UnCivil War |
I also published three short stories in January…
| 1. | Dinner with the Devil |
| 2. | Last Person on Earth |
| 3. | Telephone |
And two photography posts
| 1. | Fort Casey |
| 2. | Discovery Park Lighthouse |
Leave a comment and let me know what some of your favorites were.
I also appreciate the help you all give from sharing my posts, thank you!
Copyright © 2021 TJS Sherman All rights reserved.
Musing & Creating with T.J.S. Sherman 