Don’t forget to check out Anne’s and my new Five Buck Forum, the most affordable members-only sharing, caring, and business-building site to date. We’re so happy with all the features of the forum, the Webinars, the courses, and of course, the cameraderie and networking. For the price of a Happy Meal, you can be part of it.
One thing we’re not so happy about are the technical issues we had yesterday. My theory is this – the amount of time spent testing links and connections is directly proportional to the amount of time spent fixing them after the launch. We had a few glitches – more than a few – but we’ve either fixed them or found work-arounds for them. If you’re trying to access the forum and can’t, send either Anne or me an email and we’ll get you in.
Today I intend to finish the large project, spend time in the forum, and get some marketing done. October is coming into view and I want at least two projects in line before that happens. I have a lot of money coming in the pipeline, but nothing here yet, so the goal is to really increase the revenue so that the holidays will be smooth sailing.
It’s a late start for me today. I was at my writers’ group meeting last night, which when we get together, runs late into the night. We discussed a lot of things, such as writing from the past (not in the past) and keeping it relevant to today. It’s a problem a lot of us have, especially when we’re fictionalizing something from our memories. We also talked about my problem, which was how to build the right tense into a poem. I tend to write things literally, which is a bad habit in poetry if I’m getting too caught up in the facts. One poem in particular had these lines:
“I’d driven those three hundred miles, each one bringing me closer to
Dread, to the reality of a world that didn’t have
You in it…”
What the other writers didn’t like was the past perfect, which added entirely too much switching of this moment in my poem that was now in a different moment. I was going literal, they were wanting more immediate emotion. They’re right – it was too much and unnecessary. That’s why I love hanging out with these people. They help me develop into a better writer.
One poem none of us touched was one I wrote in my usual fashion – last minute. Because I’m about to dig out from under a large pile of work, I’ll leave you with it in hopes it inspires you to create something of your own, even if it’s the last minute:
The five pm artist
Writes poems frantically
Hoping to make sense, seeking out
Coherence and cohesion amid
Ihavetogetdresseds and shitit’salmosttimes
So much pressure to create when
the job is to create but when it’s
Lefttothelastminute and the words just
Spilllikewateron a pieceofpaper,
Saturating, threatening to tear the center
Outandthewordstumbledownontothefloorand
Fall between the cracks.
How have you introduced time into your writing? Do you translate your tense literally, or are you able to shift gears? When was the last time you wrote something for you?
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