Title – The Old Ways

Author – Tracy McCusker

eBook – Yes

The bride stood upon a cairn, on a broad groaning hill. There was no preacher, no festive cheer–just the wind and her blowing hair. She held a bridesmeet in her hands. A stone she’d worked with chisels until, at last, it became her token for her promised one.

Her grand-dame had covered her face at the oldness of the bride’s ways. “God love you, god protect you, don’t look into his eyes.”

Dressed in green, the bride stood alone waiting for her prize.

At last, he came, a white shadow against the moor. His armor tarnished, his gait unsure, his sword coated with a sickly must. And it was a curious thing, as he closed, looking for a stone to rest his legs against the wind (to lay down and, perhaps, not rise again): his wasn’t the face that peered into her dreams. His was of a gentler shape, a kinder brow, a simple chin–a weary, but always laughing grin.

It piqued her, this face–“Good sir!” cried she, and he looked up with a start.

The knight took in what scene unfolded from the rocks. A bride in green towered over him. Her hand raised up in challenge. But in her hands: a living flame. A heart that called out his secret name.

And though he knew the ways of empty places and the caution meted to traveling men, he thought the advice outside its earthly ken. In her face, he sought to know the truth of her intent. And as he gazed into her pale, blinking, mirrors, he felt the piercing of his flesh.

The bride, far from being unmoved, herself was transfixed. In her hand she felt the building heat. Yes! This one!

Whether she pulled him to her or he climbed the scraping stones, it is hard to say: tales differ on this point. On the pillar, they embraced, they two, and split the bridesmeet in twain. And as the deed was done, they fell:

The bride in green and her new fairy king embrace arm-to-arm; the heart in their hands holds more than they can, in the kingdom beneath the cairn.

Read the other Amazing stories here :

When: October 8th – October 21st

Theme: Horror/Suspense or Uncanny Nature

How to join: Send a tweet to @bullishink or @dustyjournal with the hashtag #poemwalk2012 and the link to your poem OR use the linky below

Prizes: 1^st Place = $25 gift certificate / 2^nd Place = $15 / Sign Up Incentive = If we get 10 or more participants, the Dusty Journal will gift a journal to her favorite entry!

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A poem walk is a simple thing. All you need is yourself, a location that you’ve been before, and a bit of time. Perambulate through your favorite neighborhood, or give your entryway a stroll. The place can be huge (a park, a stadium, a yawning lake) or tiny (a garden path, a stop sign, a hallway). Move through it, casually, like you own the place. Use all of your senses. What do you see? Does the place have a smell? Many smells? Can you hear anything? Take a few breaths. What do you hear that you couldn’t before? Is there anything to touch or taste? Run your hand over an object you don’t normally touch. What does it feel like? Is it important?

Don’t use a journal or pen.

Let the impressions form. The most important ones will settle into your mind.

Good!

Now, try to capture a sense of that place as you are moving through it. Write sentences. Fragments. Words.

The poem walk is about the place, about you, and about the impression that you get as you walk.

For Poem Walk 2012, we want your huddled masses. Horror, suspense. That prickling on the back of your neck when you walk through a natural place where it feels like you may not belong.

Bullish Ink has an excellent introduction on writing poem walks on her contest post, and a wonderful new addition.

To sign up, Use twitter hashtag #poemwalk2012 @dustyjournal and @bullishink with a link to your poem walk. Or use this handy-dandy linky below. The choice is yours!

Drumroll, please! The final tally:

82 / 80 poems

and

14355 / 15000 words

I started ROW80 with a higher word count (20,000), but I revised this goal to 15,000 after Week 3 when it became apparent that I wouldn’t be blogging for the duration of the challenge.

This round, I learned several things. One of which: blogging & using Twitter don’t help to me achieve writing goals. They rather insidiously suck up time; I would write off a few hours spent on Twitter in the evening as “research” or “responses.” I’d respond and respond, and not get any poems written. Giving up Twitter isn’t an option. Professional contacts are important to a writer (and a designer). Friends gather on Twitter, and it’s nice to blow off some steam on a particularly hard afternoon. What I will do from now on is no longer include social media / response goals in my writing challenges. It’s all too easy for me to neglect the important stuff in favor of the “research”. A side-effect of this new resolution: I will also no longer include blogging in my word count totals, unless the blogs are creative, publishable pieces (essays, short fiction, poems, etc). Work blogs, and status updates, portfolio updating…all of that is business or pleasure… the stuff around the writing rather than the writing itself.

The project fared well. I made good strides towards writing the rough draft of my next book. I finished 82 poems, and I can now see the shape of the project. I need at least double that amount of poems to flesh out the narrative arc of the poems’ speakers. In reading a few of these poems back, I can see how inelegantly they are written. It will no doubt take a herculean effort to revise them.

My final realization was that despite my no longer updating ROW80 progress on this blog, participating in the event still gives me structure. Despite my quietness during ROW Round 3, I have not given up on the challenge. To that end, I believe that I will participate in either Round 4 or Round 1 of 2013. Though I may be as quiet as ever, I am still pulling with the rest of my fellow ROWers and I am there with you in spirit.

I hope your challenge was satisfying, and that you can look back on your goals and see how far you’ve come in the past 12 weeks. Good luck to you all!

I usually write off the first week of ROW as my “gear-up” week, wherein I put into place routines and incentives to smooth my writing path (though it looks like I am staring at Twitter) and/or desperately attempt to make up those vitally lost days later in the challenge by heroically writing dozens of second-rate haiku. This week, however, I actually managed to make something!

5 poems, 906 words
2 blog posts (one on the Dusty Journal, the other on my design portfolio)
3 responses

Huzzah! Next week, my first full week, will be my first test to see how well I can integrate my writing into my freelancing schedule. At next Sunday’s check-in, I’ll have completed my test mile and gauged whether my progress will be sustainable or not. Next check-in, I’ll give a run-down of my project and it’s new challenges. Wish me luck–and good luck equally to my fellow ROWers!

With the new month comes a new round of ROW80, the third round of the year, and by coincidence, my third round participating. For those of you unfamiliar with A Round of Words in 80 Days (or ROW80), it is a writing contest where you set your own goals, writing or otherwise, for the next 80 days. Participants check in by blog once or twice weekly on check-in days (Wednesdays and Sundays), and share their progress (and their encouragement) with fellow ROWers on the site’s linky list.

I last participated in Round 1 of ROW with some rather shaky progress. My goals were disorganized (writing….and drawing! and, and, and goal setting! and time-tracking!!1); my health was crumbling (though nothing like what it became in late March). I did manage to proof, edit, and release my second collection of poetry Manifesto For All. But with the book nearly finished at the end of 2011, the wrap-up took a tremendously long time.

In the past, I’ve talked about hows, the whys, and the wheretofores of my productivity. I am a graphic design freelancer; it is vitally important that I know my creative process in and out, so that I can carve a portion of that time out for writing. In January, I declared that I had no idea when I was at my creative peak. That’s easy to answer now. Mornings from 6am to 8am, with an extra burst of productivity from 10am to 2pm. Afternoons and evenings are completely bust. I’ve discovered how I can track my creative time (tiny boxes on a page), and how I can schedule work (make a list! lists are amazing!)

So what’s in store for this round? Focused goals. A laser-guided lock on writing (and finishing) a set of poems for my next book of poems.

That translates into three simple goals:

1) Write 100 poems or 20,000 words–whichever goal I hit first.

2) At least ten “modules” of creative time during the week (painting, drawing, design, etc).

3) 1 blog post per week, and at least 3 responses to fellow ROWers progress reports.

So that’s it! I will take the rest of the first week to plan out the contours of my poetry project, write an update that explains the ins and out of the project for Sunday, and schedule commissions for the rest of the month. I will be updating progress on Sundays. To all of you–ROWers, writers and artists–I wish you good luck and good health!

Dusty Journal’s Patented ROW Reminders

1. Have a major milestone as a ROW goal. If nothing else, the completion of this one goal can make up for fudging or futzing with secondary mile  markers. It will also give you a sense of completion for the round.

2. Don’t stop goal tracking.

3. Find a couple goals that fit together (like drawing and writing for a single project), or goals that can be done concurrently (like writing and exercising, or writing and cooking meals). Starting and stopping projects in the middle of ROW can result in a loss of momentum.

4. Schedule vacations after creative time, not in the middle of it! Taking a break in the middle of ROW80 leads to missed flights, stranger danger, and high insurance co-pays!

5. Keep track of your health, stay fit, but don’t let minor problems get in the way of your larger goals.  A.K.A Work through the pain. For those of us who have recurrent or underlying health issues, it’s important to not daily pain and its energy drain in the way of creative projects.

I hope my fellow ROWers have made good progress in their own projects. I look forward to catching up with everyone as this round winds to a close.

The second large piece of news is that, in conjunction with Bullish Ink, I am hosting a poetry contest for visual & prose poems. Prizes in Amazon gift certificates (or other online book/ebook retailer) will be awarded by participants & judges. The contest is tailored to entice non-poets to give it a try. So, poets and non-poets… give it a thought. Check out poem tickets and poem walks.  The linky list for entries opens on Monday. I hope you’ll join in the fun.

When I return from vacation, I’ll likely have little to say on the ROW front… but I will be sharing a few poems from Manifesto for All…and giving away a few free copies in another one of those delightful give-away type deals.

Best of luck to my fellow ROWers and non-ROWers!

What: A Poetry Contest In Two Parts
Who: For Poets and Storytellers Alike
When: February 20 – April 10, 2012
Why: For Amazon Gift Certificates and Assorted Swag. See the contest page for more information!
Judged By: Your fellow submitters and a panel of judges
Hosted By: Bullish Ink and the Dusty Journal
Max Submissions: Two poems from each category

Poetry is not as well understood as it should be in this day & age. It is an art that makes more poets than readers, and pushes “real writers” away from poetry quick as they like.

But poems grow with the world around them… and they come up between the cracks like the most stubborn ragweed.

Nearly everyone has seen a picture with a few lines of poetry attached to them; a sentimental image macro, or a poetic meme. A few of us have seen their photographic counterpart: a hand-written label stuck next to an incongruous object. A prose account of a stroll through a town or next to a river bed would be recognized as journal fodder, or a choice descriptive passage for a novel.

These are, as Susan Woolridge calls them, two poetic forms: Word Tickets and Poem Walks. In honor of two new poetic forms that scarcely would have been called poetry a hundred years ago, Bullish Ink and the Dusty Journal are proud to present a poetry contest.

Entering the Contest

1. Create a Word Ticket or a Poem Walk (or both if you like!). Read on to learn about word tickets & poem walks.

2. Post these poems in a single entry on your blog. You can enter up to up two from each category.

3. Enter your post URL into the contest linky-list (will be available beginning February 20th). The linky list code to add to your blog is provided below.

4. The contest closes on April 10th.

5. Your fellow entrants will vote to award the Jury Prizes. A panel of judges (your hosts) will also award Judges’ Prize.

Word Tickets

A word ticket is a photograph of an object and a name tag; the poetry is half image, half linguistic ledgerdomain. “Trigger stones,” if you will.

Cut out words from a magazine, or choose random words from your favorite story (article, etc). Nouns & verbs work the best (concrete words!), but feel free to choose any word that strikes you. Choose one, or two, or three. Create a “word ticket” out of any material that you like (an index card, the back of a theater ticket, some delicate strapbooking paper, etc) and stick your words to the tag. Tags can be as ornate or simple as you like. Go around your house, neighborhood, work place, until you find an object that you feel pairs up with your word.

What strikes you?

What triggers you?

What object/word ticket combination speaks to you?

When you’ve found the object, attach your name card, snap a photograph, upload and voila–you have a word ticket.

Poem Walks

A focused prose account of an experience in a familiar place of no more than 250 words; the poetry is in its incisive description

Take a walk through a familiar place. Do you normally go out with headphones and an iPod? A phone that you flick through carelessly? Keep all technology out of your hands, and just watch everything that there is to see. When you get home (or to a convenient resting place), jot down some notes about the experience.

What was new?

What was unexpected?

How did you feel about the place when you started–when you finished?

Did your feelings change towards the place?

The trick with any observation poem is to observe closely and write, but not to let observation or writing get in the way of the other! Craft a prose passage about the place, as though you were writing a description for a novel. Now pare it down to its essential bones. Make sure no word is wasted. Try to evoke the sense of you moving through a space and the emotions it brings up. Keep in mind a poem should have a beginning, middle & open end like flash-fiction, but the parts are an emotional arc. There! Now you have a poem walk.

Poetry is no longer the exclusive domain of people who can read meter; we encourage everyone to enter! The contest closes on April 10th.

Good luck!

Linky list blog code!

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<script src=”http://www.inlinkz.com/cs.php?id=128744″ type=”text/javascript”></script>
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This has become a stumbling block. I’m ostensibly a professional poet, and ostensibly I sell poems.

But should I be? I have been turning over in my mind the wonderful example of Gabriel Gadfly. His website is devoted to daily poems that he announces to his followers via email and twitter. He builds up an audience on the same principles as webcomics. You give away the object to your reader. They laugh, they think, they come back for more. When it comes time to make a book, the fans support you. New readers can easily sample your work on the web. The hard work of convincing your audience that you are a poet of note is already done by the daily efforts of writing, posting, and reaching out to your audience.

For a market that doesn’t see a lot of cash (and let’s be honest, poetry is the worst market in all of literature), Gabriel has created a niche for his work.

His example is leading me to re-evaluate how & where I should go looking for an audience. I have decided to follow Gabriel’s example, and put my energies towards creating a website that will publish poems on a weekly basis. After Manifesto For All is sent out for proofs next week, I will delve into the muck of website building yet again to create a place where my poems can be read on-line. Currently, I think it will be a website separate from the Dusty Journal. This is a place for musing. I wouldn’t want to clutter it up with unfortunate poems lobbed at my fiction-writing ROW peers.

On the work front, this week turned out to be a tremendous & average sort of week. Tremendous in that I published Letters from Nowhere, my first poetry collection, on the Kindle. (If you want to preview the book, the print version actually has poems to read). The average: I only made the expected headway on Manifesto For All. But as I look back at the week, average ain’t bad by half.

1. 360 / 300 minutes on the manuscript. This coming week will be the final week of full-time work. Manifesto for All will be sent out for proofs by Saturday.

2. 100 / 200 minutes of sketching and drawing. Less work that I would have liked, but still more than zero minutes. I had a meeting with a client on Tuesday for a large illustration job; I am excitedly looking forward to dipping my toe into professional work.

3. Excel entries were not tracked for this week. I decided to see what my productivity looked like without detailing it in a spreadsheet. As it turned out, I did still accomplish a bit of work (as well as spent hours fruitlessly wrangling with epub. How I hate epub!) but not as much as I would have, had I tracked my time. For this coming week, I have hooked myself up with a timer (mytasktimer.com). If I can’t track starting times for what I do, the least I can do is track the amount of time it takes to accomplish something.

How did your week go, fellow ROWers? What tremendous and average happenings befell you? Have you had any revelations about how you want to sell your work (if you’re published), and if not–have you given thought to what you might do once you’ve finished your first novel/book of poems/table-top book of found SPAM art?

On Monday, I did the last prep before sending the manuscript out to its beta readers. Since then, it has been a week of pretzels. Mental pretzels, sure, bending myself this way or that–trying to anticipate my beta readers’ complaints. But also actual pretzels, because they’re salty & delicious, and good-tasting gluten-free snacks are few and far between. I also had an interview with the Surly Muse which was far less surly than I expected.

I learned not to second-guess my betas. Think of it this way: if you could anticipate the sore spots of your work, you wouldn’t need fresh eyes on it, would you? Beta readers have their own set of expectations. They are the soft landing between the manuscript and the reading public. Poems I thought would be problematic flew by with flying colors. One poem was caught in their dragnet not for being bad, but merely for being a lesser copy of a poem directly following it. I would have never spotted the similarity.

What I have learned is how productive it can be to read with a beta in real-time. Dan kindly looked over the poems with me as we conversed through instant message. As he was reading, he provided a line or two of feedback on the ones that caught his attention. I read with him, imagining what he saw on each the page. It was as close to reading the manuscript with new eyes as I could get.

This line-by-line reading caught a few awkward phrases, revealed the ebb-and-flow in each section. If I could have read it with someone in the same room, we could have also talked about individual phrases. That kind of beta would be tedious (maybe even impossible) with an entire novel, but for a collection of poems, a short story, or a few important scenes in a novel–it is a good exercise. It helps you cut the superfluous, so your remaining words can strike right to the bone.

One interesting facet has emerged from the beta readers (as well as you, my blog commenters), is that the blackout poems are far more popular than I thought. I initially chose to provide the poem text in the opening sections, and provide a few photographed pages of the blackouts in the final pages of the book. With the upswell of interest in the actual blackout pages, I am going to add in 10 more blackout pages in the final section.

How did the work for the week go?

1. 2 poems, 314 words. Writing has been (as in past week) dominated by poems. I wrote two juicy rhyming poems to be included in Daniel Swensen’s fantasy novels.

2. 60 minutes / 300 minutes. Prepping the manuscript and reading-along with my beta are the only work I’ve done this week. With their feedback, I am confident that next week will be the last full week I work on Manifesto For All.

3. 167 minutes / 150 minutes. Starting next week, I am upping the number of minutes I spend sketching. My next project will include original artwork, so now is the time to refocus & refine my sketching skills.

Productivity tracking, as always, is a bit of a bear. I’ll save those thoughts for later. This week, I will work on posts on designing covers & prose poems. I have an exciting contest, in conjunction with Bullishink, to announce in the next two weeks.

Reading through my fellow ROWers status updates on Wednesday, it seems as though many of us have been beset by illness and other energy-sapping setbacks. To all of my fellow ROWers: hang in there, and good luck.