Promises, promises... #saboteur17 #theselkie

So, a few weeks ago I posted that my solo show, The Selkie, was eligible to be nominated for a Saboteur Award this year. I rashly promised to film me running around and around my garden like an over-excited toddler should the show be nominated.

The show was only bloody shortlisted.

So yeah. Now you can vote for it to win, should you wish. Frankly, all of the shortlisted shows are either by me or by people who I like/ admire (mostly both), so I will be chuffed whoever wins (though, obviously, slightly more chuffed, and definitely more manic, if mine wins).

And here’s the video, filmed after work (hence the security badge) and by the expedient of propping my phone on a chair on a table in my garden (hence my head being partially severed). You asked for it. Here it is:

It's a kind of magic… #napowrimo

So, halfway through Napowrimo/ Glopowrimo, and I’m actually on track. I accidentally wrote two poems on the first day, set the second one to go live on day two, and have followed that pattern obsessively so far. Ironically, knowing that I always have a poem in hand and could chill out if I wanted to has kept me on the straight and narrow. Very confusing – welcome to my brain.

Tonight’s poem (which will become tomorrow’s, of course) appears to be a new form. I was trying to find the name of (and rules for) the poem form where you reduce the number of words in each line until it’s down to one. Couldn’t easily, and then gave up as a new idea formed.

For Reasons, my prompt for myself tonight was “Abracadabra”. I remembered that people used to make the word into a protective/ healing charm, in triangle form, reducing the word by a letter each time:

Abracadabra has eleven letters, so I reckoned: eleven lines, first line has eleven syllables, the next ten, and so on until you have a one-syllable line to finish. A cursory search of The Internets has not, so far, shown me that this is a thing already, though I’m very happy to be corrected if I’m wrong…! ☺

Until or unless someone can tell me it’s called something else, I’m going to christen this take on another form The Abracadabra, and you’re welcome to do whatever you like with it.