Things I Have Been Doing Recently

"So, what have you been doing recently?" you ask, prompted by the title of this post.

"The following -" I reply, "taking photographs, updating social media, writing very short poems."

This post is dedicated to these three things.

In March, my fifth book (Years Ago You Coloured Me, a poetry collection) was published. It now being May, it seemed a good idea to update the images on my social media sites to reflect the fact that I now have five, not four, books out. I have therefore been taking photographs of the aforementioned books in the hope of creating some suitable images for use on the aforementioned social media sites.

Having created some potentially suitable images, I've had to spend time updating my website, Facebook page, Google Plus, YouTube etc. The slightly annoying thing is that I rarely get to post the whole photograph on these sites. Some sort of cropping of the image is usually required. I am therefore posting the two main photographs on this blog so that you can see them in their entirety.

Writing-wise, I've been playing around with the Tanka form (these days, five lines of 5,7,5,7,7 syllables respectively). Corrupting it, people might say, as I haven't exactly been observing the traditional split between one phrase of 5,7,5 syllables and a second phrase of 7,7 syllables. Oh well...

Anyway, I've written a Tanka to accompany the photographs. Five books. Five lines of poetry. It seemed appropriate.

Five Books

Open these five books

            carefully. They are filled with

               dreams. But whose? Yours? The

               writer’s? Readers not yet born?

                      Or do the books dream themselves?

                                                                                                 J.S.Watts