I write poetry — sometimes it’s even pretty good. Anything poetry related will be under this section :)
I’m going to briefly interrupt the holiday-themed posts to share the fact two of my poems were published at Page and Spine last week. The two pieces are really very different from one another, so it tickles me to see them right beside each other on the page. The first, A Chance to be Heard, is a sci-fi poem inspired by robocaller/dialers and the second, In the Valley, is nature-tastic.
Like most people I know, the past couple months have been pretty much a total blur for me. A blur of mostly good things, but still a blur. Not only does time move faster the closer and closer I get to my 40th birthday, but the amount of projects on my plate this autumn/winter was (frankly) obscene. Also mostly good, but an obscene number of them. One of the side effects of that was that I wasn’t writing. I was reading, editing, transcribing, formatting, organizing, shortlisting, etc. etc. but not writing.
Which, since I like to call and think of myself as a writer, was kind of a problem.
So last week I made a spontaneous decision to take this week off all of that and write. I even announced it on Facebook to make it all official-like. As you do.
That means this week I’m not reading Corvidae submissions, not editing stories for A is for Apocalypse, not looking at proofs for the December issue of Niteblade (though I’ll send them out to contributors when they come in LoL), not whatever-ing. I’m just writing.
But, me being me, I needed concrete goals or I’d spend the week meandering from thing to thing and not actually getting anything done.
Ta-da!
My primary goal for the week is actually the 10,000 words I need to write to be successful with my MicroWriMo goals but the To Do list is which projects, specifically, those words are going to come from*.
The ‘To Do’ section of this list is made up of the projects which have been in-progress for the longest time or, for whatever reason, are feeling like they are high-priority to me right now. The bonus/rewards are the more fun and/or less urgent things I’ve got on my radar. The way this system is going to work, each time I finish something on my “To Do” list I can either do another project on the To Do list (if I’m feeling uber productive) or I can choose something from the Bonus/Rewards section.
I am not crazy. I don’t expect to get this list done. I don’t expect to get even a quarter of this list done. I would really like to cross three things off the ‘To Do’ part. We’ll see if I can pull that off, but mostly it’s the 10k words that matters. And writing.
Anyway, at the end of the week I’ll post an update and we’ll see how I’ve done. Hopefully this public accountability will help keep me on track a bit 🙂
*Somewhat randomly, when I’m writing poetry while simultaneously dealing with a word count goal I count each poem I write as a minimum of 100 words because I find picking precisely the right words for a poem takes a lot more time and effort than the quantity of those words accounts for.
Two of my poems, Two Wrongs and Golden Hour (which are completely different from one another aside from the fact both have nature-y stuff in ’em) are included in this month’s issue of Dual Coast Magazine. It looks like quite an impressive line-up of contributors, including Milo James Fowler who I am always happy to share a table of contents with 🙂
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
Write 1 Sub 1 is a super supportive group of writers who, inspired by Ray Bradbury, have committed to write stories (or poems, or novels, or whatever) and submit them for publication on a regular basis. The hardcore members aim to write and submit one story a week. Some set their goal at one a month. The point, at least to me, is consistency. It’s easy to let our writing get lost in amongst all the other things happening in our lives and W1S1 definitely helps shine a spotlight on it and keeps you motivated and conscious of how much you are (or aren’t) doing in that arena.
I didn’t sign up for W1S1 this year, largely because my goals for 2014 didn’t include a lot of short fiction. However, I’ve been a happily participating member in years past and so, when submissions opened for Drunk on Writing, W1S1’s first ever anthology, I totally sent them my qualifying works. Happily, they accepted one of my poems, Broken.
Drunk on Writing has officially been published (yay!) but best of all, because of the terms of the contract I’m totally allowed to share it here with you for free. YAY!
You can download a copy of Drunk on Writing below.
I hope you like it 🙂
For some reason WordPress won’t let me upload the .Mobi or .ePub versions, but I have them! If you want one, just drop me a line and we’ll make that happen.
Enjoy!
My poem “Hold This Camel” and vignette “Memories” were both reprinted in this month’s issue of Hermeneutic Chaos. Neither were available online before, but now you can take a peek and give them a read for free if you are so inclined. And you should be. Because, c’mon! 😉
My vignette, Memories, and poem Hold This Camel have both been accepted for inclusion in the November issue of Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal. Both of these are reprints, but Memories is one of my personal favourites, and Hold This Camel has never been available online before, so I can’t wait to share them with more people.
Hermeneutic Chaos have also offered to share audio recordings of me reading each of these, which I think is pretty cool. I’m not sure I’ll actually manage to record something I don’t hate, but I’ll see what I can do. November isn’t very far away though, so I’m not overly optimistic, but you never know… you never know… *fingers crossed*
Just in time for zOctober (because, ya know, I didn’t have enough apocalyptic awesomeness to celebrate with A is for Apocalypse and Waste Not) I’ve released my zombie poetry collection:
Yay!
I’ve been meaning to put this collection together for honest-to-gawd years but things never seemed to work out, until now. That’s why, though I’d normally wait, set a launch date and try to build up some excitement and publicity before officially launching a title, I’m not doing that with this one. It’s ready to go, and so I’m going to set it loose upon the world before something else goes wrong to delay its release LOL
White Noise contains 20 of my zombie apocalypse poems, some of them are reprints (including the one which was included in Imaginarium: Best Canadian Speculative Writing [2012] and the one which was nominated for a Dwarf Star award) and some are being published for the very first time.
Ghosts of the city
peer out of the gloom
around him
As a child he’d loved it
when the ‘clouds fell down’
and cloaked his world
in mysteries
Now, though,
it was just one more thing
to hide the shamblers.
One more obstacle to
his survival.
One more enemy.
Amazon (paperback)
Amazon (kindle)
Smashwords
White Noise is $5.99 for physical copies and $0.99 for electronic ones.
Exceptions to this are if you buy a paperback copy (a great way to fill your cart when you need $5.99 more for free shipping, amirite?) you’ll get the Kindle version free and also, if you were subscribed to my newsletter yesterday you received an electronic copy for free.
“A collection of vivid scenes laid out in sharp and articulate verse, that when assembled, construct a grim narrative filled with tension, stark imagery, and unusual beauty. WHITE NOISE reaches in and evokes a visceral response— not always the one you’d expect.”
—Tim Deal, Shroud Quarterly
“In this collection of poems, Rhonda Parrish manages to capture all the emotions of life during an apocalypse: From fear and desperation to pain and sorrow. She even shows us love and hope. Some serious but most tinged with humor. This is a great collection of poems about the zombie apocalypse.”
—Carol Hightshoe – author of the Chaos Reigns Saga and Editor of Zombiefied I, II and III
“As soon as I read the first poem I was hooked! It was macabre but it wasn’t too far. Poetry puts our insides on our outsides and when it comes to zombies, well, that could get pretty gross in a hurry.
These poems were really good! They were passionate and made me think about zombies from new angles than I had thought about them in the past. There was a dash of the metaphysical put in and a lot of real living, non-zombie feelings as well. I’m going to go back for a second read, because they deserve it.”
—Virginia Carraway Stark, Starklight Press
My poem, Matches, is in the most recent issue of Ruminate Magazine, which was published just this week. Matches may very well be my most poem-y poem ever and I’m incredibly proud of it.
If you’d like to check out a copy of Ruminate I’m told the code TSAVE15 will give you 15% off either a single issue or a subscription 🙂
In October I’m going to participate in zOctober 2014 at My Book Addiction. I’m also hoping to have a few zombie-centric things going on at my blog here (though nothing quite as intense as the Summer of Zombie Blog Tour). Hopefully that will coincide with the release of my newest zombie title *fingers crossed*
This is mostly a head’s up, but if you’d like to swap some zombie-centric blog posts, provide a guest post or participate in an interview on my blog let me know 🙂
I love this cover art! Even more, I love that it’s a publication I get to add to my Ego Shelf because it contains one of my poems 🙂
Beneath, originally published by Every Day Poets, is included in the 2014 Dwarf Stars anthology 🙂
My contributor copy was waiting for me when I arrived back home from When Words Collide and I absolutely can’t wait to sit down and devour it. I already snuck (sneaked?) a peek at the page my piece is on and saw Megan Arkenberg’s poem, This Bus Stop Was a Coral Reef, Once which I enjoyed so much I read it out loud to Jo (who also liked it).
My poem, Vampiric Fluff, has been reprinted in this anthology edited by Carol Hightshoe, These Vampires Don’t Sparkle
I’ve previously described the poem as my ‘flufftastic iambic tetrameter vampire poem’ and really, I think I picked that description because I love saying iambic tetrameter because it makes me sound all clever and pretentious. This poem? Pretty much the least pretentious poem evar. Possibly as indicated by the title 😉
