Poetry Friday - Happy St. Patrick's Day

It’s Friday! And you know what that means: Poetry! Want to know more about Poetry Friday? Click this link right here. And be sure to check out Linda's blog, TeacherDance, to see this week’s round up of wonderful poetry related posts, blogs and goodness. 

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Happy Poetry Friday, everyone! Tomorrow is one of my favorite holidays--St. Patrick's Day. Maybe it's because St. Patrick's Day is close to my birthday, or maybe it's because I make mounds of fried cabbage (no one else likes it but me!). But really I think it's because I like to make little green foot prints around the toilet bowl and dye the water green. I always get a kick out of my daughter being indignant that a leprechaun used our bathroom.

To celebrate, I am sharing another Shel Silverstein poem, The Search. I just finished reading Where the Sidewalk Ends to the kids and I love how fun reading his poetry aloud can be.

(c) Shel Silverstein
Orginally published in Where the Sidewalk Ends

I also have a bit of good news! Two of my poems that I wrote back in October for my Poetry Inktober challenge are being published by Spaceports and Spidersilk magazine later this year. I am especially excited because this will by my first time being published. So hooray for that!

Also, Donna over at Mainely Write piqued my interest in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge that starts in a few week. I am really excited to do my theme reveal this coming Monday, so be sure to come back and see what I have planned.

March Writing Updates and Goals

I feel like it has been a while since I did a writing update. The beginning of this year has been hectic. I cannot believe that it is already March. Where the heck does the time go?

While I could always be doing more, I feel like I have drastically increased how much I write compared to a year ago. I feel like consistency is a major key. I may only be able to write 500 words a day, but if I do that 5x a week for a month, that's over 10,000 words. I'm still not quite hitting that mark, but that's what I'm aiming at right now--500 words a day.

Here are a few of the things I'm proud of so far in 2018:

• 2 picture book drafts completed
• 1 picture book revision
• 2 middle grade short story drafts
• 31 poems written
• 9 rejections (this is a good thing!)
• Chosen to be authlete in Madness! Poetry
• Active in 2 critique groups
• completed round 2 judging for Cybils picture book/board book categories
• Read 40 books (all but 8 were picture books)

And here are a few of my writing goals for this month:

• write 1 new picture book manuscript
• write 10 poems
• revise 1 picture book
• revise and submit middle grade short story
• attend my critique groups
• outline my chapter book so I can start writing it next month
• continue to read good books

Poetry Friday - New Year Inspiration

It’s Friday! And you know what that means: Poetry! Want to know more about Poetry Friday? Click this link right here. And be sure to check out  Reading to the Core to see this week’s round up of wonderful poetry related posts, blogs and goodness. 

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Happy New Year poetry friends! Can you believe that it is 2018? I always get excited for the new year and all the potential it holds. Will there be bad times? Absolutely--there always will be. But hopefully there will be some wonderful and amazing times sprinkled in as well.

I am one of those people who always sets New Year Resolutions. But I try to make them attainable and realistic. For example, if I set a goal to exercise 365 days in 2018 and then I miss a day, then there is no way for me to attain that goal. I try to avoid those types of absolutes. 

So as it is Poetry Friday, I thought I'd share a few of my:

2018 Poetry Goals

• write 100 poems
• use more prompts for inspirationn
• not miss a single Poetry Friday post
• complete another Inktober in October

Easy-peasy, right?

So, I have found that I do much better when I pull inspiration ahead of time for a poem. When I sit down cold and just try to randomly come up with a prompt for a poem, I fail miserably. I think that is why I was successful in finishing my 31 poems in 31 days back in October--I made up a word prompt list for the entire month.  Many of the poems went in very different directions than when I originally thought of the word, so the prompt is just a launching point. 

In addition to everyday life, here are a few of the places I plan on pulling inspiration:

My husband participates in various illustration prompts on twitter, and a few of them I plan on adapting for poetry.

@pinchpunchpost gives a monthly creature prompt

@animaloonies gives a monthly inflated animal prompt (they're quite amusing)

@AnimalAlphabets gives a weekly prompt that rotates through the alphabet

Last year, I discovered Laura Purdie Salas' "15 words or less" Thursday prompts on her blog. I love the simplicity of it and I really enjoy just spending a few minutes warming up the poetry muscles. I definitely plan on participating more this year. 

Speaking of New Year's goals, here is my contribution to Laura's prompt this week.

Parasite Depression

January is always gloomy

For a parasitic roomie

New healthy declarations

Make for tenuous relations

© Rebecca Herzog 2018

November Goals 2017 - AKA Heck Yes!

So guess who completed every single day of Inktober? This girl!

*actual clip of me dancing

Yeah, I'm just a little proud of that one. It wasn't easy, especially towards the middle of the month, but I did it. National Novel Writing Month is up next. Hopefully, I can keep the momentum going.


Last Month's Goals Review

• Write 5 poems for anthology (I just couldn't crack it and the deadline has now passed. Cue sad trombone music)
• Outline 5 chapter books (well, this kind of happened. But not all 5...)
• Finish RIP reading challenge (finished 3 of the 6, still working my way through them)
• Inktober Poetry (Done done done! See happy dance above)
• Continue doing Poetry Friday
• Submit Madam Fang (Yes! I finally submitted it! It is submitable now!!)

All in all, last month wasn't too shabby. Here's to a new month and new goals!

November Goals

• Win NaNoWriMo (hit 50k words)
• Write 2 chapter books in my Monster Girl Squad series (25k each)
• Finish reading 3 books
• Edit Madam Fang back matter (the non-fiction part)
• Put list of publishers/agents to submit Madam Fang
• Submit Madam Fang to at least 2 more places

August Writing Goals

Whoa. So July went by super fast. I have been having so much fun posting book reviews and writing a bit of poetry, that I forgot to give an update on how my writing goals went for July. Overall, I am pretty happy. There's always room for improvement, but that is life. So, without further ado, here's the update!

July Goals Review:

• Finish final draft of Madam Fang and submit it (Oops...yeah, I dropped the ball.)

• Write 2 instagram poems (I have successfully posted poetry every week for the last 4 weeks!)

• Write book review (Yup. Lots)

• Run book giveaway (Heck yes! And there's another going live this Saturday)

• Daydream more about potential story ideas (I was able to do some brainstorming, but not as much as I would have liked)

• Finish 5 books (finished TWELVE! Thank you BookTubeAThon!)

August Goals:

• Finish final draft of Madam Fang and submit it for publication and Rising Kite contest

• Continue weekly book reviews

• Continue weekly poetry reviews

• Start working on my Zine

• Hold book giveaway

• Read 3 books

• Daydream a bit more about potential story ideas