sitting in the dark
I remember again
the idea of China
365 Poems: #1
Boots, the stray cat,
lies black and glossy
on the porch,
ignoring tomatoes
ripening above.
2010
2010 is here. It sounds like the future, doesn’t it?
2009 was a year of consolidation, after walking Japan in 2008. Hard to believe it’s been over a year since I arrived at Cape Soya! I did embark on one new quest in 2009, starting a publishing company and editing an anthology. I didn’t quite make my deadline of the end of December, and there’s still more work to do, but the table of contents for The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder, and Evolution has just been released, along with the front cover. The book includes short stories, poetry, and artwork about evolution and launches on 12 February 2010, Charles Darwin’s 151st birthday–just in time for Valentine’s Day. I’m really looking forward to releasing the book into the wild. (Join Tangled Bank Press on Facebook or Twitter to keep abreast of the news.)
While there’s plenty of work yet to be done launching The Tangled Bank, my mind is already turning to my next project, or rather returning to an old one: writing a book about walking Japan. I stopped writing on the Four Corners of Japan site soon after returning, mentally exhausted. But my walk has been stewing away for the past year and is about to come to the boil. I have an outline, and am aiming to have a completed manuscript before the end of the year.
I still plan to include some of my haiku in it, and–partly for that reason–one of the things I got up to in 2009 was study poetry. I’ve taken up haiku and tanka again, and am applying some of the lessons I learned from my walk and my teachers. Two of my many writing goals for this year are to write a poem a day for 365 days, and to blog at least once a week.
Expect poetry.
I’ve got 5 as of today; so far so good. I expect most of them will be haiku and tanka (I’m becoming increasingly enamoured of the latter), but I might post others as well. I started submitting poetry last year (my first acceptance was about the ecology of zombies) and blogging poems generally counts as prior publication, so that might cramp my style a bit. But, as with my walk haiku, the idea is to launch little sketches out into the aether and see what emerges.
Other plans for 2010:
- Returning to PNG for six weeks in June/July.
- Attending WorldCon in Melbourne in September.
- Studying Mandarin.
- Graduating with a Grad Dip in Writing, Editing, and Publishing.
- Reading a lot more. Revisiting childhood books and finally getting to some long overdue classics.
- Getting an outline of a novel down on paper.
- Taking up Tai Chi again.
- Blipping.
Getting back into music as well. Have Dirty Three, The Necks, and Pavement to look forward to in the next few months. A year of action. Hope your 2010 is shaping up to be just as good.
