Conclusion of Ghost Story IV/ NaPoWriMo 2017

The more regular viewers of my blog will have noticed I’ve been quiet for a few weeks now knee deep in poems for NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month). NaPoWriMo (or National Poetry Writing Month) as a poet is always a challenging time of the year where you have to write a poem a day throughout April. It may sound easy to some people out there, but let me gently say it is not. I first attempted this in 2012 by following each one of the prompts on the excellent NaPoWriMo website on a daily basis throughout that April and struggled like heck with it. It didn’t help that was for sure I was working in a job at that point which left me exhausted some days by lunch-time and trying to focus to write sometime over lunchtime was let’s say was very hard work indeed and so in the result I produced a very mixed bag of poetry indeed.

2013 I followed the same rules again and although I found it hard again, I came away with around 1^st drafts of a good half a dozen poems which eventually made The End of Summer but like last time burnt me out completely, it took me about two months to actually start writing poetry again.

I changed my perspectives in 2014 in the middle of March by deciding to try to focus the poems into a circular narrative which became Ghost Story.

The origin behind Ghost Story was only slight. Although I had wrote a number of sequences by that point, for example the four poems that made up the end of summer, trying to do a thirty part poem was a challenge that goes without saying, let alone trying to tell a tale which I would have got away in a novel or a novella possibly better.

The names of both characters if my memory is correct didn’t reveal themselves to me until several pieces, and I can’t remember why I chose them both like I did. The location of course at the metrolink (or tram or light railway stop) near my works and I was stood there a few days before 1^st April and came up with the gory thought what if I was due to get on that next metrolink and a Ghost stopped me.

That first year was difficult as I didn’t know where the story was going, let alone who the characters were until halfway through the story and I treated it as a one off and gave them a strict one off kind of feeling.

In 2015, the origin of Ghost Story II came simply from walking across a certain major train station in the centre of Manchester a few days before, and I looked up at the roof and thought to myself why if a rifle man got up on the roof and started picking people off and Andy was in the train station and Michelle came to him again.

Last year 2016 and 2017, Ghost Story III and Ghost Story IV both were planned a bit more but not blogged until 1^st April in both cases, in the case of III with my brother buying me an excellent book about secret tunnels underneath Manchester and for this year, I thought about some over the top rock bands I’ve seen over the years and thought what they would be like as Vampires with their myths set among the Pendle Witches.

All been good, Part V will follow next year with the story at least starting in Altrincham and we’ll see what horrors I can drag the characters through but part of the fun with NaPoWriMo at least for me now is seeing where the story goes for myself as well as everybody who reads it and all being good, there will be at least another two or three years’ worth of stories to come for Ghost Story and then perhaps health permitting I’ll start something else.

Ghost Story can be read at:

Ghost Story I   
Ghost Story II
Ghost Story III
Ghost Story IV
Ghost Story V (** Forthcoming April 2018 **)