Did somebody say Phys Ed?

Hello, hello, hello,
It’s three weeks into the Publish Everything Challenge so I thought I would triple your greeting just for the fun of it! By way of update, the challenge is still going strong. I have managed to stick to the daily posting schedule, even with some Big Things happening elsewhere in life, so I’ll give myself a pat on the back for that. I have mostly stuck to the rules as well, which hasn’t always been easy because of the cringe factor attached to some of the pieces, but I haven’t allowed that to stop me complying and have discarded only a couple of things that were truly rubbish or didn’t make sense because I had scribbled down some half-thought, never developed it, and lost the thread by the time I returned to it.
I am definitely feeling more connected to writing again, which was one of the drivers for the challenge, so I’m pleased with that too, and I am learning something about my patterns and interests as a writer. I tend to say a lot about feelings, thoughts, experiences, and little about concrete, solid, tangible things like the world around me, making me think that I should probably get out of my head once in a while. And there are definite recurrent themes in my work, like weight/fat/body issues and faith and spirituality, which is unsurprising with them being central to my identity and things on which I dwell often.
A few readers have mentioned they’d buy a book of poems on the latter of these subjects, and there might well be a collection in there somewhere – maybe even collections for the different themes – but I think of collections as being for Proper Poets and don’t think of myself as one of those. Or, at best, I am kind of like a casual poet rather than committed one, and that doesn’t qualify me for a collection (according to the logic in my mind, anyway, which admittedly isn’t the most logical of places).
Time is an interesting consideration that has come up during this exercise as well, as the writing spans decades. Some of the earliest pieces are around twenty-five years old but could have been written at any point since. They tell me both how much I have changed over the years and (sometimes depressingly) how little.
I’m thinking of bringing other writing into the mix now – shorts, flash, sketches, memoir – so it isn’t just the poems getting all the attention. Variety is the spice of life, after all. I will trawl through my laptop and notebooks for all of that, write their titles onto slips, and add them into the envelope soon. And I’m going to start adding #PEChallenge to the posts to act as a sort of single handle for everything in the Publish Everything Challenge. Although, the PE bit does bring to mind Physical Education, the subject I hated most in school because it was always so bloody difficult, which almost puts me off using it. Then again, it is actually quite a good fit, considering this is all about doing the things I find difficult. So, #PEChallenge it is. I just hope that it doesn’t bring the wrong sort of PE enthusiast here – they’re not going to find what they’re looking for on this site…!

Peace and blessings,

Nazira