Getting back into publishing poetry

A couple of days ago I drove down the highway to the capital for an appointment and I also spent a couple of hours catching up with a friend. On the way back home in the car I listened to music on the radio. The music made me think about my poetry. I haven't written anything for a year. The task of managing mum's illness and getting her into care took up all my energy last year, or most of the year anyway. When I got home I decided to talk about the poetry, and I posted something on Facebook, then yesterday I went into Google Plus and did a solo hangout on air (where you capture the video in a recording and it is stored on your YouTube channel).

The hangout goes for about 9 minutes and in it I talk about the problems I had last year. At the end I go on to recite a poem that has been up on the Patreon sponsorship site for a year, titled 'Giants', which is about the weather. We have had some terrible hot weather in the past week so it was timely.

Then I decided to post another poem, again a poem from a year ago which had not previously been published. As usual, I made a note of the publication in my publication spreadsheet. I like to keep track of what is published, and where. This makes it easier to manage poems in the publishing world, because normally a publication won't take a poem that has previously been published anywhere.

All this publishing activity on Patreon does not necessarily mean that I will be writing more poems any time soon. I do however have a fairly large stock of unpublished items that can be published on the web if I want to do that. But the activity is a change for me. I have been cooped up in my shell for so long - really, as I've mentioned on a number of occasions, from March through to November - that breaking out of it in any way (such as publishing poetry online) is remarkable.

The other thing that has happened in the past few days is that the dates for the move have firmed up. I will be moving down to Sydney on 9 February. I have to go down there by plane once before then to take mum to a specialist's appointment, but the date of the move has now been set. I should be ensconced in the new apartment by 12 February. It will take a bit of time to unpack and get rigged up but everything else being equal we're looking at a few weeks to a month at the most before the move is complete.