I'm in Love!

Hi, it's been a while! Thanks for sticking with me - my plan is for this to be the first of a new wave of blog posts about children's poetry: writing, reading, imagining, and everything in-between. Thanks to @dreambeastpoems for encouraging me just to be me. Here I am!

What a year! Today I have been trawling my Twitter account (exciting reasons) and I discovered that from August 2021, when I set up my Attie Lime account, until now, I have posted over 125 poems that I've written for children. Not counting every single hasty prompt piece dreamed up while the spuds boiled, or the published pieces. I knew I was sharing regularly, but I even surprised myself! Of course, a pesky fleeting thought came - imagine if I'd put them in a book, instead.

But the thing is, it's not about money, it's about LOVE. I love to write. Of course, when people tell me they have enjoyed my poems, it's wonderful, especially if they have been shared with children. I really enjoy school visits, and another job on today's to-do-list is to begin rescheduling community events. I can't wait to pop on a Santa hat and get kids joining in with some festive rhymes, in the village hall. That's the point of writing for children, after all: to share poems with young people, and hope that in them they find joy, resonance, hope, laughter, escape, or even (trying not to sound too icky here), themselves.

I am absolutely chuffed to bits that 2023 will see my first collection published, by Beir Bua Press (title TBA), and in 2024 Ventorros Press will publish my collection of poems for bedtime, Lullaby Pie. I might even make a few pennies (I still happily wear a pair of pyjamas from around 1998, so you can make your own assumptions about what motivates me, in life). I hope to publish more books. I hope to visit many more schools, perhaps even festivals, plus bookshops and libraries. I hope to round up the village children and make them laugh with poems in the school holidays. I have more ambition for this, than for anything that has come before, but at the end of the day, if none of it were possible, I would still write. For the pure and absolute love of putting words on paper. I'm head-over-heels in love with writing poems for children and feeling all the more joyful for the fact that people enjoy reading them, too. Thank you.

Dream Diver

If I could dive

what would I see

beneath the sea,

the sea?

A cave of mermaids

shucking shells

all of them

for me?

A school of fish

in Literacy

learning

A, B, C.?

A coral reef

quite undisturbed

thriving

peacefully?

A litter-picking lobster

clearing

up debris?

A blue whale singing

songs of joy

so very happily?

If I could dive

what would I see

beneath the sea,

the sea?

Attie Lime

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

Blankety Blank

Have you ever had the BEST writing idea come to you in the middle of the night, or just as you're nodding off? I think we all have. A perfect line, an entire haiku, or the elusive title to your latest W.I.P., like a vision, only to be lost come morning. Conversely, how many times do we sit down to write, pen poised, or with a fully-charged laptop, only to be faced with a blank page, which remains resolutely blankety blank, despite our best efforts?

Today was a planning day. A day to consider marketing, promotion, website updates and so on. I began, and then I stalled. I was distracted by Twitter (counts as networking??), nagging household jobs (kitchen table day today, not writing shed), and a hundred other things, one of which, inevitably, was the thought that I should be writing! So, I gave up, put aside the laptop, and got out the ironing board.

It turns out that the part of my brain which conjures up poems at 11.30pm in that liminal space between wakefulness and sleep, also kicks into gear when faced with the mundane task of ironing fifteen school shirts on a Monday afternoon. Cue me, ironing, laptop open on the kitchen bench, notes app open on my phone next to it, and a flood of ideas. I did not finish the ironing.

I suppose what I'm trying to say, is that I gave my brain some space. I let it meander, wander, and find its own sweet path, rather than fastening it into a metaphorical vice and attempting to squeeze something out of it. And miraculously, the Blankety Blank turned into an actual Something.

Try it, it might just work for you, too.