margaret clough

How did I manage to lose this blog again? Perhaps I am just impatient and if I had waited after typing in the blog name it would have appeared as it has in the past.

However, I seem to have got here at last and am ready to enter something new.
What is occupying my attention at present is the problem of what to do with what I write.  Of course, like most writers I know, I write for myself first of all.  A story, a poem,  or perhaps a memory, cries out to be written down. (This is what happens quite a lott of the time.) but once committed to paper, you want to share it. Belonging to a writing group is very satisfactory. The others in the group are obliged to read your writings or else to listen to them being read aloud.  The flipside of this is that you are, in turn obliged to read or listen to theirs.  These sessions are very pleasant and were quite suffieint for me for a long time, but then I had a story published on the net and a piece for children published by an NGO.  This was heady stuff. I felt as though a I was becoming a proper author! And then-- to my amazement, after attending regular poetry workshop fo a while, I was approached by a publisher!  Can you imagine! Actually approached! This lead to a little book of poems seeing the light of day and to a few invitations to read at gatherings of like-minded people.   It was scary but great.  I felt like a celebrity. (almost)

Now after several years of writing almost every day, I have quite a large collection of unpublished short stories and  poems.  I have not been entirely unsucessful in placing them. A few poems have been published in journals and a few stories in internet magazines.  I have also given printed copies of my children's stories to my grandchildren and to the grandchilren of friends.  I wondered about puttiingtogether another collection of poems, but I have had second thoughts about this.  I asked my publisher how the book had been selling. She told me that sales had almost covered expenses.  That doesn't sound very wonderful to me. Althoug she sounded positive about publishing another book, I can't see that there is much in it for her.  I think I must be content with belonging to writing groups and attending poetry readings.