Posts that don’t fit into the main themes of this blog
I’ve just loaded three poems and one prose piece that appeared here in February & March 2022 onto my poems page. It’s a very, very busy time of the year for me, work wise – in my day job I work in recruitment, and am currently recruiting for roles in the UK, Netherlands, Germany & the USA. This is actually a reduction in number of countries & time zones (I have also recently filled jobs…
Back from a few days holiday – my first break since starting a new job in October. I needed it. Whilst the new role is great (it’s amazing how feeling valued at work improves both your productivity and mental well-being!) I was getting tired, and starting to struggle a little. I’m currently recruiting in the US, UK, Netherlands, Germany and Singapore, with candidates for some of these roles coming from a range of locations around…
I’ve hardly submitted anything anywhere this year. Work pressures, lack of belief in my own writing, time spent on other activities. The usual excuses. But as I start to write again, I am starting to look out for new opportunities to submit poems. I follow a good few magazines on Twitter, so am watching out for magazine open submission windows. There are also a few listing sites I use. But it can be a bit…
I’ve been away from this blog for a couple of weeks. Firstly work has, as is often the case, got in the way. For those who don’t know, I work in recruitment, and have been working on a range of assignments in the following countries – Australia, Germany, Hungary, The Netherlands, Singapore, the UK and the USA. Needless to say managing the time zone discrepancies isn’t easy, but it’s worth it financially – and I…
….that the country entered into the first lockdown? When I say the country, I mean most of us. Some who disobeyed the rules received £10K fines. As we know, many of those who made the rules just carried on partying. But that’s for another post. I’m writing this whilst looking out into our garden. It’s a little too cold to sit there for long, but it is a glorious blue-skied spring morning. During that first…
Finally! My first success of 2022 (I’ve been focussing on existing projects and manuscript work primarily rather than sending stuff out so far this year). My prose poem At the Landfill of Memories has been selected for this year’s anthology (out of over 1,300 poems submitted). Dempsey & Windle are my publishers, so I like to enter this competition to support them (I don’t enter that many contests). It doesn’t mean I automatically get work…
It’s a truism that messianic war mongers are willing to send others to their death. Seemingly at ease with their decisions to condemn both civilians and soldiers to an early grave. So focussed on their own destiny, they seem happy enough to throw away the destinies of so many others. They sicken me with their rhetoric about hard decisions that have to be made, when they are insulated from the consequences. I’m still trying to…
How was Eunice for you? Or Dudley? Or Corrie, Malik, Barra or Arwin? Are you looking forward to Gladys, Herman, Olwen or Ruby? I’ve read some of the reports, seem some of the data. There’s lots more of this, and worse, on the way. We all know this. But we kid ourselves that someone, somewhere has the solution. And maybe they do. And is there anything we as individuals can do, whilst oil companies make…
So our great leader is off to Kiev next week. I’m sure he’ll do a brilliant job at minimising the risk of war between Russia and Ukraine. Just as he’s done such a brilliant job of everything else, not just whilst PM of course. I am so tired of his mendacity, and of his government’s complicity in enabling it. And then there’s the constant gaslighting by Johnson and his cabinet colleagues. As if the rules…
The end of another year. One that I, like most people will be glad to see the back of. Yes there have been highlights. I’ve had successes poetry-wise; 15 poetry magazine acceptances and a couple of anthology appearances this year (which is a lot by my standards). Ten of which were for publications that I’d not had success with previously. Thank you to the editors of the following (in no particular order); Ink, Sweat &…