A Vocal Centurion

This is my hundredth post on Vocal, should I do a poem or should I write about what I have learned or learnt or is it both or neither. English grammar can be a pain at times. I saw ads for Vocal sort of advertising untold riches , but this year I was scaling down my writing on by blog Seven Days In and that has gone down to around one a week (but 100 posts so far this year , down from my biggest year when I averaged more than one a day.

On Vocal I have done around twenty mosts a month with nearly a thousand reads, and from bonuses , tips and reads around a hundred dollars in rewards with forty dollars paid out for Vocal plus subscriptions so I am actually in profit, although I am not making a living from it, and will probably at some time find I am running at a loss.

The thing is Vocal has made me some incredible friends who share my love of creating , although all of them are far better writers and poets than I could ever hope to be.

I write too quickly and seldom go back and edit things. What hits the page stays on the page is my modus operandi. I once wrote a song called “Never Ever Thought” which you can hear the soundcloud demo here and that was done straight to my phone with nothing written down. I always said I would write some proper lyrics for it but still haven’t got round to it.

For the first time since school I actually wrote a sonnet and I think my writing may have improved and a lot of this is down to the Vocal environment , my Muse and the Vocal Support groups on Facebook , namely

Vocal Social Society

Vocal Creators Support Group

Vocal Media Creators Hub

There are some amazing people who I should tag such as

Lesley

Judey

Tony

Aiden

John

(follow the links to their Vocal pages)who have given me inspiration , support , encouragement and constructive criticism (thinking of John’s comments on my first attempt at a villanelle which you can see here, it did not stick to thru villanelle structure and I tried to have different rhymes all the way through, which is a little more difficult than a real villanelle , but with a real villanelle your lines have to be able to stand the emphatic repetition and here is my second one ), there are many more but would be here all night to include everyone. You know I love you.

I have also been able to help and encourage other writers , even encouraging them to join groups and Vocal+ and put them right when they are unsure of what they have written. Someone recently said they had requested a particularly beautiful piece of poetry to be removed from Vocal. I read it and was really impressed and told them to take a copy , keep it and make sure it was published. They did and it is an outstanding beautiful piece which you have probably read and loved.

So this weekend I hope to have a thousand reads with my hundredth post. To celebrate this I will read with a video I did of a visit to the roman fort at Vindolanda with Alex Harvey singing the WH Auden poem “Roman Wall Blues” from his album “Soldier On The Wall” . Hadrian's Wall is about half a mile from my house and in 2010 I took part in lighting Hadrian's Wall from end to end using torches.

Below is the video I made at the time but I will do a further post about it soon, it was a truly invigorating and historic experience to be a part of. Of course I wasn’t in the video and managed to melt my gloves and burn my hand with my torch.