writing and writers – Page 140 – don't confuse the narrator

poems from the pueblo

Some of the short poems from this blog have been brought together with others in an eBook: Poems from the pueblo: Haiku & assorted fragments.

There are several formats available for download:

• FREE iPad-only version from the iBookStore. Watch the publisher’s video to find out more about this fully-enhanced ebook:
(The video has music, so you may want to check your volume control.)

Just read/watched/listened to your #PoemsFromThePueblo. What a little treasure box! And love the whole interactive thing. – Elizabeth Hopkinson, fantasy writer, sent via twitter from her Hidden Grove.

• Download the FREE ePub version direct from Tantamount. (This version includes embedded sound files which will only be accessible if your reader supports sound.)

• Or buy it from Amazon.

I’m hoping there will be more poems from the pueblo – both further collections of fragments and, eventually, a collection of the more substantial poems I have written while living in the Spanish hinterlands.

You’ll find full information about my books over on my website. Feedback and reviews are always appreciated.

gatsby-mail and the green light

Gmail chat screenshot (LHS status lights only)

Whatever program(s) I’m using on my computer, there is almost always a narrow strip of another window showing on the left hand side where I can see if I have new emails. (Yes, I’m sure I could set up an audio alert, but we all have our idiosyncracies.) Not only do I see when new messages arrive, but I also see the little green lights flicker and I know when contacts around the world log on and off.

Perhaps the “g” in gmail stands for Gatsby.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And then one fine morning —

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

I’m not sure where “the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us” fits into things, but I can see my attempts to keep up with everything that’s happening on the web mirrored in that quote.

Tomorrow we will read faster, scroll down the page farther…
And so we click on, surfing against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the ether.

And so I blog on, posting against the current…

snow song

One last snow post for the moment, as rain is forecast now and they say it may all clear soon. An earlier version of this poem was posted a couple of years ago; I haven’t made huge changes, though I’ve added line breaks and tweaked it a little.
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cheese dreams

Insomnia found me browsing the web when the headline Cheese fire causes traffic meltdown in Norway tunnel caught my eye.

As a cheese lover, how could I not be interested in a story that starts:

Some 27 metric tons of flaming brown cheese (brunost), a Norwegian delicacy, blocked off a three-km (1.9 mile) tunnel near the northern coastal town of Narvik when it caught fire last Thursday. The fire was finally put out on Monday.

Twenty-seven metric tons of toasted goat’s cheese: a turophile’s delight!

(I gather brunost is made either from goat’s milk or a mixture of goat’s and cow’s milk, though perhaps not from the breed of mountain goat whose rather hazy photo I snapped in the Sierra de Francia, Spain.)
Continue reading “cheese dreams”

a hook to hang things on

I typed “a hook” into the Google search box and was surprised to see that the first auto-complete option was “a hook in writing”.

At the moment, I have no idea of how to grab my readers’ attention half as effectively as this photo is likely to, nor do I have any ideas for a poem that might be hung alongside the image.

So I guess I’ll just have to leave you all in suspense…