7:35 a.m. — Atlanta
Hello, all. I hope you are well. First, a reminder that summer is coming [unless it's winter is coming, where you live]. During the summer, Thursdays go dark. For some reason, I still give you Fridays. Hmm. We’ll see. Tuesdays I give you ahead and I drop by to expound, but I don’t read, or comment. I will explain further the first Tuesday in June, how Tuesdays will work. Meanwhile:
1] Our first link, to my amusement, also appears in today’s We Write Poems, so, I will give you a companion link, one that takes you to Robert Peake’s home page. Robert’s is among the handful of writers’ blogs I began following, when I returned to the U.S. in 2010. He writes beautifully, and articulately, and he has a sense of humour. Sometimes he reviews poetry books, sometimes he shares one of his poems, sometimes he has interesting stuff, like poetry hotspots in London [where he lives at the moment]. His blog is also a thing of beauty to behold, clean lines and easy on the eyes. Go explore.
2] Our second exploration is an unusual publication, the Safety Pin Review. In their About, they say: biweekly literary magazine featuring fiction of less than 30 words, with a major D.I.Y. twist: in addition to being published online, each story is hand-painted onto a cloth back patch, which is attached (via safety pins) to one of our operatives—a collective network of authors, punks, thieves, and anarchists—who wear it everywhere they go for a week. I’m not sure how anyone can resist submitting. Despite it asking for fiction, its 30 word maximum means that something poetic can work so long as it looks and feels like fiction and you call it fiction. They have forty-eight issues to date. Read a few. It doesn’t take long.
3] This is for your amusement. As it regards punctuation, I know you are intrigued already. Punctuation is not usually a topic for amusement.
4] Patrick Ross’ The Artist’s Road, is another blog I have followed from the beginning of my own odyssey. You have read one, or two, of his posts here. This one, entitled ‘Stop Super-Sizing the English Language!‘, should be of interest to all of us, as writers. Patrick’s topic is one I have long fought in the classroom, even forbidding the use of the word ‘evil’ when we study Macbeth. I offered twenty-five shades of the word, instead. It lead to a more nuanced study. We lose the meaning of words when we apply them to everything, with no thought to degree. Think about how often we hear the word ‘tragedy’.
5] The final link is to a free photo editor that is easy — i.e. I was able to use it — and produces useful effects, as well as collages. PicMonkey has a paid upgrade, but if you go through the offerings on the left of whatever photograph you are looking at, you will find a number of the effects are free.
Go play. I will see you tomorrow for the week’s roundup of prompts; Tuesday for an image prompt; and next Thursday, for the last Poetics Serendipity until August.
Happy writing, all.
