Contradictory Abstract Nouns (Photography Challenge)

Today I want to create an image that shows the trust in distrust and the distrust in trust. I took all of the lights that made up October’s color palette outside to decorate the driveway for the trick-or-treaters, so today, since I woke up while it was still dark, I used a couple filters with my driveway lights.

I think I’ll leave them up for one more night and then bring all the lights inside and set up the mirrorworld for November.

Today’s Poem

November PAD Chapbook Challenge

Today is not only the first day of NaNoWriMo, it is the first day of Writers Digest’s Poem a Day Chapbook challenge. After a month of writing a poem each day in November, we have a month to select and edit some of the poems to create a chapbook manuscript.

Yesterday I went to the library and found some fun books on writing poetry that will hopefully provide some insights to inform this month’s journey. The books I’ll be reading and talking about are (amazon associate links):

• The Aspiring Poet’s Journal by Bernard Friot
• Rhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry by Brad Leithauser
• Every Day is a Poem by Jacqueline Suskin
• The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice by Tony Hoagland
  

Because the challenge starts on a Tuesday, we get a Two-for-Tuesday prompt:

1. Write a beginning poem, and/or…
2. Write an ending poem.

I think it will be interesting to explore the beginning and ending of trust; the moment trust becomes distrust, and/or distrust becomes trust.

Modern & Contemporary American Poetry ModPo

There are also two weeks left to this year’s ModPo. This year I’ve been doing the work to get my completion certificate which means writing close-reading essays bout selected poems. This week, week 9, we are assigned our final essay. It’s a creative assignment to create a poem and then write a close-reading essay of our own poem: Should be interesting.

To create the poem we have the choice to either create a Mesostic based on the work of John Cage, using the Mesostic Poem Generator, or to use one of Bernadette Mayer’s experiments to create a poem.

Since I have all week to create my poem, and write my essay, I think I’ll play with beginning and ending as my mesostics, but what text to use? I could use the opening scene I write for NaNoWriMo. That would be fun for “beginning” and “ending” since my opening hook should set up my ending as well. However, I’m also reading On Truth and Untruth by Nietzsche, and the second selection “On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense (1873)” fits great with today’s look at trust & distrust. So I’ll start by typing some of that into the Mesostic Poem Generator and see what I get.

Beginnings: a Mesostic (reading through Nietzsche)

National Novel Writing Month NaNoWriMo

This is my 8th NaNoWriMo, and I have reached 50k or more words of a draft every time. If you are looking for prompts and ideas, every day of November 2017 I posted all kinds of prompts and ideas that I still look back to for inspiration. Every year is a completely different experience with entirely different ups and downs. This year I’m trying a few new things to try to get the words to flow instead of feeling like I have to yank them out of me.

First, I bought a paperback copy of Novel Writing Blueprint Workbook by Jill Harris and I’m using it for my Morning Pages Journal. I’m really enjoying writing in it. It’s the size of a large, thick paperback book, so it feels like writing a novel in a novel. I loosely follow the prompts in the book, so my morning pages stay focused on thinking about my novel. I feel like this was a good choice for a journal to use during NaNoWriMo.

Second, I joined 4theWords. I had been thinking about ways to gamify my writing that wasn’t only putting stickers on paper, and 4theWords did that for me. I battle cute forest monsters with my word count and win virtual loot for quests and costume pieces for my avatar. It is surprisingly rewarding. The time flies by and the words stack up. I’ve been using it to write my Writober flash fiction stories. Finger crossed that it continues to be as fun with my novel. My original idea was that I would use it as one of many writing stations through out the day, but I’m enjoying it so much, I can see myself doing all my writing in 4theWords, including my poems and writing warm-ups. There’s a special offer for NaNoWriMo in the Offer’s Section of the Writer’s Resources on the NaNoWriMo site. I highly recommend taking them up on the two free months. They don’t ask for any information other than a username and an email.

Third, I created a Pinterest collection of cinematic photography. Thinking about how I was able to come up with complete stories from just one image every day for Writober, I thought, why couldn’t that work for November? If I collected a variety of images, hopefully something in the day’s image would spark the scene, especially on days when I’m feeling stuck. I really like the images of Gregory Crewdson for story inspiration, so I started searching for photographers like Gregory Crewdson, and came up with all sorts of interesting images to look at. Just in the exercise of finding and collecting photographs, I solidified ideas about one of my characters that I really like.