This time last year, I signed up for a twelve week Open University course on writing fiction and, hey ho, I’ve done it again. Thirty two weeks this time, creative writing, WITH POETRY – am I mad?! Sweepy Jean, your Gil Scott-Heron entry may have come in the nick of time – that kind of poetry I can relate to. But what’s this about biography and autobiography? Will I have to follow Fabio Cappello around while he negotiates his exit from England management? Or Rooney? Please, not Rooney, I don’t speak Scouse! Beckham though..
I’ve been faffing about considering this decision. Full time job, just getting into writing, full-time job, might have just found my voice, full-time job, no time to write my stuff. What? The trouble is, I’ve just been on leave and being on leave gives me a distorted sense of my creative availability because it’s not being used up on brain-tickling research projects. Nevertheless, I put out a plea on Twitter – should I sign up? But the Twitterverse did not want to take responsibility for this, even collectively, as I might come back and bite its bum once the reality hit home. The Twitterverse is right, I would have given it a thorough going over had it guided me in the wrong direction but what was the right direction? Only one thing for it – the Universe Splitter app on my iPhone! Plug in your choices and this little gizmo blinks and winks, judders and jangles, and finally explodes its conclusion – in this universe, I would do the course.
So here I am, signed up and bracing myself. Is it the right decision? Based on a silly bit of software that sends no photons anywhere at all and splits nothing but a few pixels on a screen? As I pressed that button, I knew I was going to ignore it if it said no.
Somewhere, my alternate self is justifying either taking the advice or getting on and doing the course anyway. Seems I’m my own woman no matter what the universe thinks and so, when I start carping on about being over-committed with no time to breathe never mind nurture an original thought, just remind me I have only myself to blame!
Dr Suzanne Conboy-Hill 
I’ve never taken a creative writing course in my life so I take my hats off to you. Okay, you’re worried you won’t have time to write with a full time job? Yes, it’s hard, but it can be done but you have to be very disciplined and it depends on the job. My last full time job was so mentally draining, I could not finish my novel and I quit that job to finish it.
Oh and poetry and I do not mix, we do not like each other, I could never write poetry…
I am going to get an ASBO over the poetry module, I just know it! At least if I put it here, everyone can have a self-esteem restoring hoot!
Poetry ASBO…love it…
When I was a tortured teenager, a long time ago in another galaxy, I wrote a few poems, all to do with vampires…dear god, morbid child…(still love them bloodsuckers though)
I went from Clint Eastwood in Rawhide to William Shatner in Star Trek and bypassed vampires altogether despite holidaying in Whitby where Dracula is reputed to have washed up at some point. The only poem I recall writing was something in blank verse about a dying badger when I was around 7. ‘Sunny Stories’ wasn’t having any of it so I hung out in space instead!