In celebration of shitty first drafts! Day 1 :)

The wedding is all done and dusted, I'm officially a 'Mrs' now for the first time in my life. I've spent the last few months doing the headless chicken wedding planning dance, and now that's over, I need to get on with the rest of my life.

A big part of that needs to be my writing. I have a dissertation to complete over the next few months, so need to get back on track with my writing. The slight problem I have is that, in my poetry, I've been following a similar theme for the last couple of years and that seems to have come to a natural end. So I need to find out where it's going now.

Having done bugger all over the last couple of months, I need something to kickstart myself and have decided to attempt the poem a day for a month challenge. I tried this quite a few years ago and it worked really well. Most of what I churned out was crap, but some of it wasn't, and it helped a lot with the writing discipline. Although, having just spent over 2 hours battling with my internal critic, and trying to breath life into something, I'm going to rename it to the 'Shitty first draft a day' - just to remind myself that it really doesn't matter whether it's any good, it's the doing not the end result that's important.

Everyone writes truly awful first drafts at least some of the time, for most people it's most or all of the time. And it's far to easy to listen to our critic shouting at us that we're no good, that it's pointless, that we may as well give up now.

So, all hail the shitty first draft! Here's mine for today :)

Cloud shadows

bombard skin

threaten to scour away

the weight of her world

she pins each toe, ankle, knee

stops herself running

pierces thighs & hips

stomach to still his butterflies

pulls skin taut over ribs, breasts

limits her inhalation

punctures throat, stops

that scream

pins eyelids, lips closed

fingernails first left

then right self-

mutilating

only thumb and forefinger

untethered

weightless

beckoning.