Hello all. I felt like writing something a little different today. I felt like doing a journal series about me working on publishing a book of my poetry. I thought it could be something I could do once a month to tell you all about my process as well as keep me inspired to keep working. I thought would write a bit about how I got started writing poetry today and some reasons why I want to publish. On with the journal.
I've been writing poems since I was a young teen. These were tough years for me. I discovered that I had a couple learning differences, ADD and Dyspraxia. These made the ability to do school work and occasionally my dance study a struggle. I was also an extremely artistic kid who behaved like an adult in a school with normal teens who focused on sports. Sports are lovely just not for a kid with low motor skills who wants to put on a play every second. Eventually I started going to correspondence school in 9th grade which helped, but until then I struggled. While I was not friendless it was hard to relate to the other people my age and I often had nothing to do when I had free time in classes.
Then I discovered a book that my mom had bought on how to write poetry. It showed you how to write a variety of types of poetry forms. I found that I loved writing poems. Often if there was time in school I would write poems. It was a great way to express how I felt or imagine how others felt. It filled my time and it filled my soul. If I had a hard day at school I would write a poem about it. If I had trouble with a dance teacher I wrote about it. It was also a nice way to explore writing stories about characters in my mind in a short way. My learning differences made it very hard for me to organize writing things like short stories, but the story ideas were still there, and I could write them as a poem. I eventually my mom who is a songwriter taught me how to transition what I had learned from writing poetry into writing songs. Over the years I have started writing more songs than poems, but occasionally I still will write something that doesn't fit in the song box, and that becomes a poem.
One day in January of 2015 I realized that I had a crazy number of poems in that I had written from the age of perhaps 14 to 29 that I had done absolutely nothing with. Not all of them were great but some I thought were good enough to see the light of day. The funny thing about poems is that you actually have to put a book together if you want people to read them. Songs you can sing anywhere, but poems have to be in a book of some sort. Unless you are going the slam poetry route which is cool too, but it probably wouldn't get out to quite as many people.
The bottom line is that I am planning on showing some of these poems to the world by self publishing my works. It's taken awhile for me to actually be able to have time to work on it, but now I finally have the window of time I need. I'm in the very beginning stages. I am just starting with typing up all the hand written material. I usually pick a day, put on my favorite music, and just start typing. I'm thinking I might add in some the magnetic poems of the day that I've created for twitter and tumblr as well. However, I'm going to let my mom be my editor after I'm done with just typing things up. I need an outside view to pick what fits the best. Also I do occasionally veer toward to the creepifying. I have often called my style something close to Langston Huges meets Edgar Allen Poe. Occasionally I am very heavy in the unsettling Poe direction. I need someone to tell me if it's too creepy. Haha! Anyway that's all I have for my rambling poetry book journal for this month. I'm a little scared of all the typographically errors that might be in this. I try to check, but you know...ADD, Dyspraxic, slightly dyslexic, fast typing...not always a good mix in a long post. Lol! See you all tomorrow. Stay shiny!
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