Mayday!

So, I've never been a trophy guy, one of those people who always wants to win and thinks that if you don't win you have somehow lost or are broken or flawed. I've actually only won two trophies in my whole life. The first was for "Most Improved Swimmer" when I was a sophomore in high school and a varsity swimmer. I remember at the time being really proud that someone had noticed that I was trying pretty damn hard. The next and last trophy I proudly share with Caroline Vaughan, née Crawford, who could eat a whole sleeve of saltine crackers faster than I thought humanly possible. She was my crew for the Mary Boone Cup Race, a fun regatta with tasks for the captain and crew throughout the race which were mostly designed to slow you down and make you look silly, and although I sailed a good race that day, I'm pretty sure we won because Caroline has some sort of saltine super power.

When I decided to tackle the National Poetry Writing Month Challenge of writing 30 poems in 30 days, I did so because I wanted to try to do it. I didn't take on the challenge because I wanted people to look at me and think, "Ooo, there's a bad-ass poet," but because it seemed like it was going to be hard. I enjoy a struggle. I didn't finish 30 poems in 30 days and that's fine. The prompts were harder than I expected (lots more structural stuff) and I only had, at most, about three hours a day to work on them. I'm also a little picky. I don't want to read crap and I don't want to make other people, especially my friends, read crap I've written. So, I'm short seven poems. I've put blog entries for each of them, because I intend to finish them, but I'd rather take my time with them and write something I'm going to like.

I want to say thank you to all of you who have been reading my work this month and for the months (and sometimes years) before this month. I want to also thank Andreas Nicholas who helped this old man put together this website so I've got somewhere to write. I'm going to keep posting a poem a month for the remainder of the year to help me stay on target with the new collection, so please feel free to subscribe to the site for updates. I wanted to create Just Write because I think everyone should be writing or, at the very least, unafraid to write and this gives me a way to keep saying that—just write!