Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Reflection

Christmas and new year have come and gone with barely a beat missed in my writing schedule - well, maybe one or two - but basically I've managed to stay on track. Most of my blogging during January will be done on my River of Stones blog http://aros-merlene.blogspot.com/ with the occasional writing post here.

2011 began as a year of poetry in development, incorporating two River of Small Stones writing challenges in January and July, and finishing up with NaNoWriMo in November. In between I worked with various forms of traditional poetry, combining this with an ocasional photogaph - my other interest.

During this year I ran writing workshops on topics ranging from Misplaced and Dangling Modifiers, Poetry - Haiku and Free Verse, Novel Writing, Punctuation, Judging Short Story Competitions, Epublishing and Social Networking for the Writer, Life Story and Memoir Writing, and creative writing in general.

I will be scaling back on this in 2012 to concentrate on my studies and to keep pace with my increased freelance editing workload. I will be running a series of writer's workshops at Melton  library for those wishing to complete a longer work, fiction or non fiction, and locality specific small group sessions (more on this later)

I finished the NaNoWriMo self-challenge with over 50,000 words for the month and continue to work on development of this manuscript, not working at the initial pace of course, but still taking a more disciplined approach to my writing. I will blog about the process from time to time, more as a reminder to myself of my own progress.

Poetry will continue to feature in my life and on this blog, although I have yet to decide what form that might take - it will unfold as the year goes on.

It is also my intention to blog occasionally about the good, the bad and the ugly of the writing world from my own experience; the humble yet brilliant writers I've met who lack confidence to promote themselves and the empty vessels who spend so many words in self-promotion they forget they need the product to back this up; the wonderful poets I know who feel unworthy of the name and those who rattle off a few lines of doggerel and call themselves poets; the writers who have turned social networking into a unique skill of ackowledgement and sharing and those who pass off the teachings of others as their own, ignoring the source.

My writing competition blog http://writingandpoetryopportunities.blogspot.com/ was well received and I look forward to keep this current over the coming year.

Unfortunately, other goals have fallen by the wayside of circumstance to be picked up some other time.

Overall, 2011 was a productive year for me in many ways and I look forward to new learning and new challenges of 2012. You've all been great company and I hope you'll journey with me.

~ Merlene

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For some reason I'm yet to fathom I'm unable to reply to comments left by others so thank you for dropping by and taking the time to read and comment. Merlene