Pamphlet! ... or should I say PAMPHLETS??
Adventures in Creativity (or, How to remain Sane as a Neurodivergent).
Today, and on every Monday (mostly) during 2025, I’ll be letting you into the process of producing short-form work for submission. In a very unexpected change to the advertised content, I have a completely new THING to be talking about… except, it’s nearly two years old in written terms. We have an update on that first, and then it is back to the narrative that began all this in March…
The last time we spoke about short-form work, I was in the process of making nineteen old poems into a fresh reality. Last week, we sent that manuscript away to contest. I could stop here as well, making this officially the shortest blog I’ve ever managed, but there’s a lot more going on than that, as that’s not all I’m here to talk about. There are some things that are making me nervous.
The main one is uncertainty around Forest Management. Three poets have provided blurbs, the cover photo has been sent, but I have not had an email back from the Press since the winner’s acknowledgement arrived at the end of March. I sent an email on Friday asking if they could let me know as soon as possible that my stuff had arrived safely and has been seen. All I can do now is wait.
Everything is crossed that I’ll have a response in the next week.
I get that other people don’t work the same way that I do: it sometimes becomes quite stressful to have to live in silence. It is one of the reasons why rejection can be quite upsetting for me (which forms part of a longer list of neurodivergent angst triggers, if truth be told). Whatever happens, I’ll be beginning the process of making poetry films for the pamphlet beginning in August.
After trying to work out how I want to do this, and not having either the budget or indeed manpower for a proper swing at a ‘conventional’ short film, we’re going to build a final narrative in small pieces using my ‘experimental’ experience from February. It’ll have documentary sections, a bit of voice acting ‘drama’ thrown in, and the poems will be extractable as stand-alone pieces for promotional purposes.
If this works as I hope, it should be a useful exercise in self-promotion going forward.
So important is this to me, that I’m booking time for filming in August. We’ll then integrate this into the ‘content’ for the Autumn via blogs and social media. I really did enjoy making poetry videos the last time it happened. It also grants me the opportunity to share storyboards and process stuff as a bonus. It becomes a useful displacement activity whilst I wait for publication to sort itself out.
This week already feels like it is happening to somebody else. In that regard, I’m very grateful for having done all the work well in advance. This will also be an interesting object lesson in how much I have grown in the last six months.
I’ll keep you updated on developments as they happen.