January 2019... really?

Yes it seems correct, this really IS January 2019!

I know that I have been very poor at keeping this site up to date as most of my online work has been in updating and refining my photography site. For that I can only offer my sincerest apologies. This is due to the three courses I've taken via Adult Learning recently. All three have been around Photography and Photoshop.

First I took an NCFE Level 1 course in Photography and Photoshop, then I took an Advanced Photoshop course and now I'm on my second (and final) NCFE photography course - this one being a Level II course in 'Photography - Creative Craft'.

I'm learning a lot and enjoying the course immensely; I have always enjoyed the acquisition of knowledge, and when I have a love of the subject this pleasure is only enhanced. And I do love photography!

But all the work I've put into the courses have, by their very nature, kept me from my first true creative love - my books. I have taken these courses to improve my book covers and content, but writing fiction and poetry was for too long ignored. For a lot of my police career I left it, abandoned it, ignored it. I felt I was unable to pursue the creative world when dealing with the experiences I had as an officer.

Of course, I was significantly and spectacularly wrong in this assertion. My creative side would have helped, would have offered some respite or insight into my inner thoughts and feelings. After all, as a young, and undiagnosed Autistic lad from Kent in the early 1970's; it's why I started to write in the first place - to help me cope.

My poetry and fiction of that time is obvious in this regard (it might be obvious in other regards too but I'm not here looking at that aspect of it!). My younger self shouts out to the older me of the deep and abiding confusion I had at the world I could barely comprehend. Others seem to fit in, to find their place, to make and keep friends with a casualness I still find breathtaking.

My constant (even now) feelings of being outside of everything and looking in found me striving for a coping mechanism that would work. Something I could at least rely on to be constant, soothing, safe. A piece of paper and a pencil are mere steps from drawing on a cave wall with charcoal from a fire; yet they were of significant help to me.

They were, and are, of the utmost importance. The method may have changed, I am living in the 21st Century after all. Thus pencil and paper are mainly supplanted by iPhone 8+, my thumbs, a screen and the Notes app. I tend to write my poetry when waiting for Laura on the afternoon school run. It's a particularly fecund time for me; the experiences of the day thus far have had time to sink in and I often see things that spark a phrase, a line and once I have that; the poem will demand to be written and will brook no argument. 

Sitting in my car, with the silent village around me, I can work on the poem and try to reveal that kernel of motivation, that spark of insight, that made me want to record my thoughts on that day at that time and in that place.

Fiction? Well, fiction is different. A PC, two screens, music (Tiger Moth Tales and Death Cab for Cutie are apparently favourite at this time) and a muse; the story name or idea in my mind. I sit, I open up the relevant folder, find the relevant file and start the relevant app (Word mostly). Then, lost inside my head and only connected to the outside world via my keyboard, eyes and ears, I settle down to write.

Thus far I've not had 'writers block' - maybe as you all suspected it means I'm not really a writer - as I can always find words to spin and dance and make patterns in my mind. That bit is the easy part. It is the polishing, the reviewing, the re-writing without turning it into something 'other' than the original that I find difficult; as well as finding the time to do these necessary tasks.

I suppose it's why I find poetry so appealing. My sense of recording the ever-present now, to capture it as if in amber, this has always had a great draw for me. To record my thoughts and feelings on a specific day and time in a specific place is simply amazing. It gives me insight into my inner thoughts, my responses to things I have seen, done or experienced.

Each poem is a tiny story; a thumbnail sketch of characters and  events that only take a moment or two to write or to read. Yet they take a lifetime to reveal. I love the sense of release I have when I have finished a poem. For that fleeting moment it is the best thing I have ever written, perfect, fully formed, satisfying. By the time I return to it to put it into a book - as I am doing now with my latest collection of 2018 - it is pale and muted when compared to the vivid and glorious colours I saw in my head. 

Thus, the need to continue, the desire to understand a world I have no hope of truly being a part of, this all imperils me yet requires that I continue. The pursuit of the perfect poem is one destined to continually fail. 

Yet in the failure, something of value may be created. I try to see the world in my own way and convey what I see and feel in ways pleasing and valid. Whether they are or no is not, I suppose, for me to conclude. That I try is my task, that I provide my thoughts in ways easy to access and review is of great importance. And that I leave something of myself behind for my children is an overarching desire.

Once this final photographic course is at an end, I'll have more time to devote to my written output. So steel yourselves people, there are poems as yet unwritten, characters as yet unrevealed, places and spaces as yet undiscovered.

And I intend to pursue them all ....

Stay safe and keep reading.

Alan