Category Archives: Blogging

Blogging From A to Z Challenge Theme

The Master List for the A to Z Challenge opened today. This year I’m going to explore abstract nouns through photography and poetry.

Abstract nouns are nouns for ideas, qualities or states rather than concrete objects.

I’ve chosen an abstract noun for each letter of the alphabet. The A to Z challenge skips Sundays, so on Sundays I’m going to print out one or more photos from the week and create visual poetry using a homograph (two or more words spelled the same but not necessarily pronounced the same and having different meanings).

I hope you’ll join me as I explore these concepts and combine them with the prompts for National Poetry Writing Month.

2021 Review & Planning for the New Year

The Snow is Watching by Maria L. Berg 2021

A Review of Experience Writing 2021

This fall has been intense: jumping out of bed every day to explore new photography ideas and write a poem. I know exactly what I’ve been doing since October first, but what was I up to last January?

I’m glad I took a look because I don’t want this year to be an exact copy of last year, but I have the same revision goals. I made a lot of progress, but not as much as I would like. So this year, to switch things up, just a little bit, the focus will be on Novel Revision Motivation.

Last January, I didn’t post much, but I did discover TBR Con (To Be Read Convention) a free online writers convention that I enjoyed. I looked it up and the TBR Con 2022 schedule is up. Shelly Campbell, who was kind enough to do an interview about her revision process last February, will be part of the Worldbuilding 101 panel on Monday January 24th at 2pm PST.

In February, I also had a guest post by author Ferrel Hornsby with her revision tips.

In March, I took Cat Rambo’s online revision class and started a series of posts demonstrating my work revising a short story:

  1. Revising a Short Story: working through discouragement
  2. Revising a Short Story: Pacing and Structure
  3. Revising at the Scene Level
  4. Revising a Short Story: the penultimate pass
  5. Revision: Using Feedback to Strategize

I also discovered Linda Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday (#SoCS) which I enjoy participating in each week. Having one day a week that is completely stream of consciousness is an idea I enjoy. Glad I checked over there today. Looks like Linda has a daily blogging challenge for January called Just Jot It January, in case you’re looking for a daily blogging challenge for the new year.

April brought National Poetry Writing Month, in which I wrote 30 poems in 30 days and the A to Z blogging challenge. This year I chose janus words which are very interesting words that mean one thing and its opposite.

In May I did an intensive demonstration of creating a poetry revision process and revising a poem. There are eight parts and it starts with Revising Poetry: Creating a process.

The final post in that series came out in June and then I took July off. In August I had some fun photographing and drawing flowers and I discovered the Changing Focus Challenge and made my first multi-media video with bokeh, music, and poetry. My piece is called Pathways.

In September Experience Writing had a guest post from author, poet, bioethicist, physician, lawyer and social critic, Jacob M. Appel called Vision and Revision. I attempted to do another multi-media video for the theme Reflections, but it didn’t come together.

October was October Poetry Writing Month OctPoWriMo, and Writober (flash fiction) and I found Tourmaline.’s Halloween Challenge which got me started with daily photography prompts.

In November, I made up my own daily photography prompts and continued daily photos and poetry, participating in Writer’s Digest’s November Poem a Day Challenge. I also won National Novel Writing Month attempting a rewrite of the novel I started in 2019. I wrote 50,000 words but the draft is far from complete. Guess what I’ll be working on in 2022.

And this month I made another daily photo prompt calendar, continued to write a poem every day, and made a multi-media project for the Changing Focus Challenge prompt Rest, Sleep and Hibernation.

That was a busy year. Looking back, I did a pretty good job of sticking with my revision theme. Though I did not complete as many revisions as I would have liked, I explored my process and have a better understanding of the steps I need to take to succeed. So here’s to a year of motivated revision!

If Snow Could Talk by Maria L. Berg 2021

New Poem

New Year’s Resolution

And the cycle continues
but something has to change
the barefoot and bicycles
will arrive too soon
coming or going
they will circle
and what will I have finished
what sweet delight
prepared to serve
the gibberish and frothing
fills pressed pulp
like teeth in a shark’s
wicked grin and yet
I continue to chum
the dark waters
and the dollars and itches circle
coming and going
when will the attention rapt
be enough to keep me in my seat
carving to the revealed
that is supposed to be inside
but I find never finished
and we cycle again
the spokes bent
the tire always needing air
the road uphill both ways
the music and stars
will arrive too soon
and any interest in taming the gibberish
will float on the froth
and effervesce

Snowflakes by Maria L. Berg 2021
The Ball Drops by Maria L. Berg 2021

The New Year

Tomorrow all day The Poetry Project is having its 48th annual poetry marathon. Hundreds of poets will be reading their poems. What a great way to enjoy the first day of the new year.

I signed up for Sarah Selecky’s Six Weeks, Six Senses writing program to jump start some short stories this year. I get my first prompts tomorrow.

I was planning on taking a little time off, maybe switching to once a week for a while, but today, the final day of 2021, I will have posted new photos and poems every day for 92 days straight. It feels silly to stop 8 days short of 100, so I’ll keep it up through the first week of January.

Instead of creating a new photography prompt calendar, I will use Of Maria Antonia’s 2022 Weekly Photo Challenge Bingo Card:

So come back tomorrow and join me for some photography and poetry for the new year, and maybe I’ll have some ideas of how we can stay motivated to revise our work.

Rushing In by Maria L. Berg 2021

Happy Reading and Writing!

Hunting the Elusive Rest

I found this month’s prompt Rest, Sleep and Hibernation very inspiring, and I’m excited to share my finished multi-media video. I really enjoyed how the stills and video fit with the sounds I collected and arranged. And it was fun to put my poem in the fire. I hope you find this relaxing and restful.

Reflecting on the use of Janus words in my April poems

Today is reflection post day for the A to Z Challenge. I enjoyed their theme and posts about games this year. Though I did not remember to do the scavenger hunt, I really liked the idea, and if anyone is still looking for a post for “bear”, I wrote a poem called Black Bear’s Branch. I also did a questions post.

Though I made it through the alphabet with Janus words (also known as contronyms, antagonyms, or auto-antonyms), exploring their uses in my poems, I didn’t find them to be as useful in turning the poem as I thought they would. Without holding both meanings of the word in mind, it’s too easy to glance over the words less familiar, or less contextual meaning, which takes the power from the twist the Janus intends.

I wish adumbrate was a more common word because it’s a great Janus, meaning both to disclose and obscure. My post that got the most likes was a puente form poem called Overwhelming Possibilities which used the Janus phrase “wind up.” My post that got the most views included my poem Put Out by Perch which was selected as a featured poem on NaPoWriMo.org. It was an amusing rant using the Janus phrase “put out.” I think my favorite Janus used was “overlook” in my poem He is a Selfish Moon. My other favorite outcome of the challenge was discovering “Popcorn-can Coveer by Lorine Niedecker and attempting to emulate her form. In one of these concise poems I used the Janus word “terrible.”

At the end of the first week, on my birthday, I found out a friend died. That messed up my motivation and put me in a bit of a funk. Writing poems was more difficult and reading and commenting was also more challenging. Definitely my least favorite part of the challenge, but not something that could be learned from really, unless it informs me to prepare for the unexpected. I’m not sure how I would do that.

I know that many A to Z bloggers prepare their posts in advance, but I don’t have a way of doing that and combining the challenge with NaPoWriMo. I guess I could prepare alternate, off-prompt poems for each day, just in case life gets in the way–in case of emergency posts for the whole month? Writing through it, was probably a good thing. Something to think about.

Overall, April (for me) came in like a lion and went out like a lamb. I hope May will leave me focused on revision.

Just for fun, I found this song called Janus Stair by Contronym

I want to thank J Lenni Dorner for bringing my attention to the film The Professor and the Madman today. It’s an interesting story about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary based on the book by Simon Winchester.

April’s Blogging A to Z challenge: contronyms, antagonyms, or auto-antonyms. Oh, my!

April is almost here! My days are flying by too quickly.

Yesterday, I signed up for the blogging A to Z challenge. This will be my fourth year combining National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) with the blogging A to Z challenge. I enjoy how the poetry prompts and the words I choose for the challenge influence each other to inform my poetry. Robert Lee Brewer of Writer’s Digest will also have daily prompts for his April Poem-A-Day (PAD) Challenge that will probably make their way into my posts.

So far I have explored the A to Z of:

2018: Words that were new to me
2019: More new words
2020: Music terms

This year I have been playing with Janus words, exploring how words that can mean their opposite might be used to “turn” a poem. For the A to Z challenge I will look at Janus words and phrases–also known as contronyms, antagonyms, or auto-antonyms–from A to Z and attempt to employ them in my daily poems.

I hope you’ll come by each day to read my new poems, see my new photographs and hear about what I learn along the way.

Hears to a creative and fun April!

The Planner Experiment: #CallForSubmissions

Over 500 Followers!!

Thank you to each and every one of you who has chosen to follow Experience Writing. I hope you continue to enjoy this writing journey. This is exciting!

The Planner Experiment

How are your submissions going? Are the planner pages helping? Do you have any suggestions for this week’s pages?

I found some new places to find submissions and I’m surprised I didn’t know about this sooner. I just discovered a couple of active and helpful hashtags on Twitter:

#Callforsubmissions

#Submissions

I’ll scour these over the next few days and should have updated deadlines for Sunday.

The Writer’s Games

Writer’s Games 2019 start tomorrow with a practice event. I’m really excited. I hope you will wish me luck as I write through the challenges. Are any of you participating in the games this year? Have you done it before? Any advice?

Happy Reading, Writing, Planning and Submitting!

 

 

Happy May! A recap of my April adventures and what’s next

galluping purple flowersI want to start by saying thank you to all of the organizers of NaPoWriMo and A to Z Challenge and the poets of dVerse. And the poets that included my poems in their lists, especially David Ellis at Too Full To Write.

I also want to thank everyone who read my poems and left such lovely comments. Everyone was encouraging and made me feel my efforts are worthwhile.

This was a long month for me  with some very high points and some low points.Signed by Anne Lamott

The high points were: my birthday evening seeing Anne Lamott at Benroya Hall; scrolling up some of my poems for Poem in your pocket day and having them on the counter at A Good Book Bookstore; and, of course, completing the challenges while learning so many interesting new words and facts.

The low points all had to do with short story rejections, but I think my very negative feelings had to do with a bout of the flu, so actually, the low points should have been seen as high points, as in, “I have new stories to shop around.”

This month hit some milestones for Experience Writing:

♦ Most views ever: April 30
♦ Most likes ever: April 16

Thank you for the comments, likes and follows!

Now to the recap.

NaPoWriMo

I found all of the different prompts inspiring. I learned so much from the resources and examples, the great interviews and unique ways to approach the page. This was a great experience and I’m glad I did it. To my readers who didn’t participate this year, I recommend giving it a try next year. And you can dive in sooner with OctPoWriMo this fall.

My favorite prompt: I think the haibun prompt was my favorite. First, because I had never heard of haibuns before. Second, it adds another element to haiku that I really enjoy, and third, because it opened up participation in dVerse’s Haibun Monday. I wrote three haibuns during the month:Contemplating the Other

Summer Comes Too Soon

The Lingering, Long Spring Day

Self and Setting

My favorite poems I wrote:

Contemplating The Other This poem, inspired by the Polish poems from Here by Wislawa Szymborska, is one of my favorites and my sister liked it and wants a copy for my nephew’s baby book which makes me very happy.

Then I think it’s a tie between the poems I did the most factual research for :

An Apple Is An Apple – noosphere

The Next Pasquinade – Pasquino

The Reliquary for the Miraculous -Saint Sidonius

I really enjoy learning new and interesting things.

A to Z Challenge

I think doing the A to Z Challenge as part of my NaPoWriMo experience was a great idea. As I learned last fall, I like to use multiple prompts to enhance my creative efforts, and the word of the day often lead to more interesting poetry challenges.

My favorite words were: xanthic (xanthodont), wayzgoose, wazzock, and atresia. All of them really.

Flash! cover

Reading

Favorite poetry books: Here by Wislawa Szymborska

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

Favorite writing book: FLASH!: Writing the Very Short Story by John Dufresne

May Plans

So what comes next? It’s time to turn my attention back to my novel. I have scenes to draft and then another full edit. While I work, I will hopefully find inspiration from:

Between the Lines: Master the Subtle Elements of Fiction Writing by Jessica Page Morrell

Writing 21st Century Fiction: High Impact Techniques for Exceptional Storytelling by Donald Maass

The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing by Evan Marshall

How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method (Advanced Fiction Writing) (Volume 1) by Randy Ingermanson

I also have a great stack of fiction and poetry to inspire me as well.

monster dancer

I’m hoping to continue to blog three posts weekly:

  1. a writing and editing post
  2. a poem
  3. a book review

Site stats tell me that my most popular day and time is Thursday at 1pm. What would you like to read most on a Thursday at 1pm: a poem, some insight on the craft of writing, or a book review?

Or is there something else you would like me to share this May?

I have decided that the photography focus for the next Gator McBumpypants picture book will be using filters. I’ll be studying an old KODAK Workshop Series book called Using Filters, so you may see some odd photos to illustrate my posts.

If you have a poem, a micro-story, a book review, or a guest-post you would like to share on Experience Writing let me know in the comments or head over to MBer Creations and write to me on the Contact page.

Happy Reading and Writing!

Here’s to an abundant and prolific May.