From epic novel to short poem or Doesn’t work doesn’t exist!

My dears,

I thought I simply tell you how it went on after taking the first obstacle in writing :)

Back then after finishing my first novel I was like HOORAY, I am the queen of the world, everything’s super, everything’s great, this is what you do from now on regularly…but nearly everything happened nearly totally different ;)

It was a hard, stony way from writing a lot to writing spontaneous short poems but let’s keep it sequentially.

Of course, in the beginning figure skating had grabbed again such a strong hold on me that the first 3 novels of course all played in that kind of sport…and likewise of course they were fanfictions with my heroes from then starring in the main- but also in the supporting roles and I had started to choose songs as the leading motive which became the title of my story.

For saving my honour I maybe should add that soon I reduced the amount of my stories to a normal size. While I didn’t gave the reader half a chance for own fantasy by completely to the detail formulated thoughts, situations and other circumstances in the first novel the follow-up was only a good one-third of the first one :)

Nevertheless, I must admit that until today I still have problems with character handicaps which means when my vocabulary is limited right from the start and I have to write a good story with a restricted amount of letters.

A frightening example is one of my short-stories which I wrote down just like it entered my mind, as usually and while counting the letters there were nearly 20.000 characters too much :( I was up the creek without a paddle because in my opinion the story was absolutely worthy taking part in a competition but what should I do with the characters I had too much? And what did a newbie like I was back then? Right, I did the WRONG thing :( I cut everywhere I could in my story until it fit with the demanded amount of characters…but meanwhile I didn’t fit with my own story anymore :( But the deadline was near and so I sent it on its way though there wasn’t much left of the charm it had to me before :( Of course it came how it had to come…a few weeks later I received the negative reply :( But also stuff like that you have to face and you learn for the future :)

I try to get back to the actual point ;)

The score so far was: first novel done…CHECK! Writing shorter novels…CHECK! Never again trying to cut a short-story from a novel…CHECK! But now I ran into the next level of a seemingly invincible obstacle in my way: Write a poem! HUH???? Poem? Me?? NEVER!! A poem has to rhyme in best of all cases, for heavens sake, I CAN’T DO THAT!!!

The problem was the time. I had found a competition with the topic environment and you could even choose if you wanted to write a short-story (of course again with that unholy limitation of characters) or a poem.

Well, there isn’t much of a choice if you refuse writing a story due to a lack of time, is it?! ;) So I sat down and hatched my very first poem :)

But the sweetest reward was the reply that this from necessity born piece of work had made it into the anthology and so I was very proud of my very first publication which landed 6 years after my first steps as a writer on my bibliography :)

Ever since then many of my poems made it into anthologies and this is kind of surreal sometimes when I think of how I refused writing poems at the beginning…oh well, actually I just stayed true to my principles because at the start I also thought that I couldn’t write a whole novel ;)

And this showed me, at last concerning writing experiments, one sure recognition…DOESN’T WORK DOESN’T EXIST!!! :)

Thank you so much for your valued attention, my dear friends :)

Take care & feel embraced by your Cosima :)