The poll results are in

REMINDER: SUNDAY NIGHT AT 10:00 CST IS THE CUTOFF FOR THIS MONTH’S POEMS. DON’T MISS IT!

Yesterday Marjorie Maddox’s guest appearance was a big hit and drew warmly appreciative comments from fans new and old. Thank you again, Marjorie, for agreeing to be my guest.

My thanks for the feedback you have provided this past week by indicating what you like most and, by process of elimination, least about various features of my blog. This has been helpful.

For each 1st place vote I assgned a value of 3; a 2nd place vote was worth 2; and a 3rd place vote was given a 1. Only a few people voted but I assume that they are representative of those who remained silent on the issues. Here are the results.

24 — Monthly Word of the Month Challenge
14 — Occasional Poetry Tips
11 — Friday Guests
6 — Sunday Poem of the Week
3 — Monthly Voting for Hall of Fame Poets
2 — Monthly Teaching Tool
1 — Monthly Kids Activity

It seems clear that the fun of writing and posting monthly poems far outweighs the process of voting for a monthly winner. Therefore I’ll change that beginning next month. For this month, which cuts off Sunday night, we’ll vote as usual. After that I’ll rethink what we do. I could skip the selection process altogether or seek some way to select monthly winning poems without a general vote from readers. What I do not wish to do is become involved in personally critiquing all those poems each month. Sorry, but this has to be fun for me too. Maybe I’ll hit on a few friends to help me by reading the poems, casting ballots among ourselves, and then I could announce the winner. Let me know if you have comments on this.

I’m not sure how to respond to the low votes for the Teaching Tool and Kids Activity pages on my website. We didn’t have much of a turnout for this voting and I don’t know if any teachers were among those who cast ballots. Teachers tell me they find those pages helpful so for now I’m inclinded to keep them. I often wonder how many blog visitors click onto the website itself but I figure there aren’t many. The more I get into this blogging, the more I can identify with the new human specie affectionately known (to me at least) as a blog hopper. That’s where a lot of fun and action seem to be.

Thanks again for your help. Don’t forget to post a poem based on STONE before Sunday night at 10:00!

David

Announcing a new Friday guest: Me

Thanks to you who have let me know your preferences among the features I’ve introduced since starting my blog last August. Many readers have dropped by to review the boxes:
https://davidlharrison.wordpress.com/2010/05/15/which-features-do-you-like-best-about-my-blog
 
But I could use a lot more votes and comments. I swear, where’s the love!

Among the comments I have received is a request for information about developing a manuscript (poetry or picture book) from start to finish. I’ve decided to take that one on myself so I’ve exercised my authority to volunteer for a guest spot on Friday, May 28.

David

Where to from here?

Hello everyone,

Now that October’s “dirt” poems are behind us, let’s see some November “thanks” poems. Remember, cutoff for posting your poems is November 21.

To accomodate an anticapted growth in submissions by young poets, we have created two divisions. If you’ll look above the daily blog (immediately below the book covers), you’ll see two bars: ADULT WORD OF THE MONTH POEMS and YOUNG POETS’ WORD OF THE MONTH POEMS. This way we can continue to showcase poems posted by our adult writers but also make room for aspiring young writers to see their own work on the blog.

When you are ready to share your poem, go to the appropriate bar, click on it and post your poem there. This way we’ll always have a place where everyone can see the growing list of poems without the need to scroll all over the place looking for them.

Again, my thanks to Kathy Temean for creating my blog and suggesting the contest; to our eleven poets whose dirt poems demonstrated how many ways a single word can inspire poetry; and to our October Hall of Fame Poet Mimi Cross and our October Hall of Fame Young Poet Alyssa Kirch. Congratulations to all!

Check out Kathy’s blog today (http://kathytemean.wordpress.com) for a great review of Mimi and her poem. Also, go to YAAGroup (www.yaagroup.wordpress.com) to see Alyssa and her poem featured.

We haven’t had many people fill in the survey box to help me learn more about the regular viewers of the blog, but enough did to give me a good idea. In general, here’s what I saw. So far we have a number of writers, some of whom have been published and some who are hot on the trail of seeing that first publication with their name on it. We are also being followed by teachers, parents, and a few students. Your interests vary among poetry, picture books, fiction, and nonfiction and preferences ranks pretty much in that order.

This helps me think ahead and make a few more plans for the blog. For one thing, I’ve begun inviting special guests to make occasional appearances here to speak on subjects that you should find interesting. These guest essays will normally run between 500 – 750 words and our first guest may appear in the next week or so.

If you have subjects of special interest to you, I hope you’ll post them to help us keep the site useful to you.

Here we are in Wednesday already. Yesterday I got down a few words toward my thanks poem. Today I’ll finish the first rough draft.

Good writing!

David