People who have followed by blog for a while will know that I have done a NaPoWriMo a few times previously. The basic idea is that I write a poem every day for the month of April. The woman who started it, Maureen Thorson, provides prompts each day, but they’re optional, so sometimes I don’t use them.

I’ve come up with most of my poetry content using this one-month marathon for the last few years, most of my other writing is prose based, so the requirement to think in a different form is a great challenge.

I’ve been out of the habit of daily writing for a while, I write every couple of days but there was a period a few years ago where daily writing was much more frequent. I still journal each morning, and I don’t count this towards the daily writing target.

I’m meeting with a couple of poets on Wednesday in an effort to revamp or recreate a poetry group where I can workshop my work. It’s at the least a time for me to read other people’s poems, I’m not very good at that either.

The boundaries imposed by a daily prompt, and a daily output requirement, have generated a lot of good work from me in the past, and I hope this will continue. I’ve stopped doing NaNoWriMo for my prose, as the practise is no longer useful, but I still see value in the poetry version.

Is anyone else doing it? We could hold one another accountable, or perhaps if you’re local to Melbourne/Naarm we could get a coffee and write together.

In all of that I’m going to try to get to some Melbourne International Comedy Festival shows as well, which starts on Friday 30 March. Things are picking up again after a couple of years of staying inside and waiting.