writing and writers – Page 173 – don't confuse the narrator

debt and ruin

WordPress blogs use Akismet to deal with spam, and it seems to work quite well. Even so, I usually check all the comments, just to see that nothing has been caught up in the filter by mistake.

I am wary of any ‘hobby photographer’ who wants me to check out their ‘amateur artwork’ with a view to using it on DCTN, but I do love the badly written false praise:

It is rather interesting for me to read that blog. Thanks for it. I like such topics and anything that is connected to them. I would like to read a bit more soon.

Clearly spamming isn’t a lucrative enough activity to warrant paying decent copy writers.

The latest comment on the fine feathers three post amuses me as it’s from a debt consolidation company: “Eliminate debt working at home.”

I don’t think what ‘Melia – the Ruined Maid – was doing counted as ‘working from home’, but she certainly seemed to have found a way to escape the poverty trap.

I have been reminded that today is World Poetry Day – “a time to appreciate and support poets and poetry around the world.” Someone even went so far as to wish me a “happy” day, which seemed rather out of place as I’m never very creative when I’m happy.

Ah well, I really should post a poem, I suppose. But not having been very creative recently, it’ll have to be an old one.
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hazy thoughts

Yesterday I complained that the weather had taken a turn for the worse. In fact it turned out that really I was just up too early for my own good: once the sun got up, the wind blew most of the clouds away.

This reminded me of the times when we would be on holiday at the seaside when I was a child and the days almost always seemed to start off looking unpromising. I remember my parents assuring us it was “only a heat haze”, and it’s true it often seemed to burn off by middle morning.

It’s perfectly clear that yesterday’s cloud wasn’t a heat haze, but it got me thinking about weather, about how vocabulary is so often tied to location, and about how both weather and the words we use for it have personal connotations.
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penny for them

After a fairly miserable weekend weather-wise, Monday dawned bright and sunny and positively spring-like. So I took the opportunity to gather some violets for my desk.

(In the photo they are on the book shelf simply because it’s tidier than the desk.)
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anthological exercise

I’m pretty sure I’ve read that Wordsworth wrote his poems while out walking, and that the rhythm of his strides helped him work out the metre. (Pause here for a link to Lynn Peters’ Why Dorothy Wordsworth is not as famous as her brother.)

I try and walk every day, even if it’s only down to the post office to check the mail box. I walk in the hope that I’ll get ideas to write about; I walk to iron out the pieces I am working on; and I walk for exercise. Yesterday was the first reasonable day for a while when I was free to take time for a longer walk, so I went round the reservoir.