Southsea Storytellers

I intensely dislike drivers exceeding speed limits and people dropping litter.

And there’s nothing effective that I can do about either of those things.

Maybe I should write a story .

Choice

I don’t have to write, but I do.

I like receiving compliments for what I write and I like it when I like what I write.

I enjoy (love?) telling stories. I used to make up bedtime stories for our children when they were ‘bedtime story old’. I do it for our grandchildren when they come to stay.

I would love to be hugely successful, sell millions of books. I have a couple of ideas in my head which might achieve that – if I ever get around to writing them. I procrastinate. And, typically male, seek instant gratification.

But this is for you. Do what you want to do.

NaPoWriMo

April is NaPoWriMo, short for National Poetry Writing Month – though these days, like NaNoWriMo, it’s an international event.

It was started in 2003 by American poet Maureen Thorson, who decided to write a poem a day and post them on her blog. Since then, poets from all over the world have taken up the challenge, and poems spring up every April faster than daffodils in Wordsworth’s garden at Grasmere.

To find out more, you can visit the NaPoWriMo website. But to join in, all you need to do is write a poem and post it somewhere – on a blog, on Facebook, wherever the fancy takes you.

Share it with the world, get out there, and support your fellow poets by reading their contributions.

You can read my contribution here.

Why?

Blog. What an ugly word.

Like a beautiful ballet dancer in a garage mechanic’s overalls. Not that I have anything against garage mechanics’ overalls but there’s a reason why ballet dancers don’t wear ’em.

Words can be beautiful or lovely or apt or intimate or ordinary or nasty or ugly. Ugly’s the worst.

But that’s what this is called so we have to live with it – or ignore it.

Instructions keep popping up telling me to start writing or type, followed by a / which I take to be another ‘or’. Well I am typing. And I keeep being instructed to choose a block. I don’t know how to identify a ‘block’ (other than a block of wood or a group of buildings in a city) and I can’t see any – so how can I choose one? There is also an irritating, rectangular shape filled with odd symbols drifting about on the screen – what should I do with that?

Why does almost everything to do with information technology have to be so complex? or, why am I so stupid that I can’t instantly understand what’s happening/required on the screen?

I hope the other members of our writers’ group can come up with a blog worthy of the name.

Here we go…

Finally got round to setting up a blog for Southsea Storytellers, when nobody’s quite sure what’s going to happen next. Four intrepid writers – Trevor, Linda, Debbie and Paul – met as usual at Southsea Library in Palmerston Road on Sunday morning. Mostly we were looking at possible covers for our next collection (‘Of Flights and Fancies’).

This post is by way of an experiment to see if the automatic posting to Facebook and Twitter is any more successful than previous attempts to link FB and Twitter.

When will we meet again? Aye, there’s the rub.

Who We Are

Southsea Storytellers is a writers’ collective based in Southsea, Hampshire, on the south coast of England. We get together regularly to drink coffee, share ideas, egg each other on, write and publish.

To date, we have published two collections of our work: ‘Southsea Soup’ (2018) and ‘Life and Love’ (2019). The third collection, ‘Flights and Fancies’ is currently in production.

You can find out more about us on Facebook; Twitter and our website