Skeleton Architecture

Happy New Year! I hope you've had a great Christmas and New Year. We did, although it was a bit quiet. The last week of the holidays dragged, mainly because I got a stinking horrible cold on January 1st, which is making me feel totally rotten. Ugh. Anyway, things are going pretty well on the writing front. I had two poems out last month, and I also got shortlisted for the Great British Write Off, which was totally unexpected, and kinda lovely. I've also had lots of things rejected, and failed to get placed in my local writing group's competition. I worked really hard on that poem and I'm annoyed with myself for not doing better, I'm trying to tell myself it's all subjective, but the usual suspects got placed again. Maybe it's just not my audience. I am slightly gutted that Maddy at Writing Bubble is going to be too busy to run the What I'm Writing Linky this year, but so glad that she's got lots of interesting things on. However, Sara at Mum T

Land This is not my land. This waterlogged clay soil is not my rich loam. I am the incomer, comeover, the offcomeden; not from 'round these parts. We do not share a history, I do not know your tales, and you are unprejudiced, but I don't fit in. And yet, I find, on returning to the green-grey valleys of God's own county this now too, is not my home. Not my land. ©   Cara L McKee, 26th November 2015

The prompt at Mum Turned Mom this fortnight is 'Colour', and I've been thinking about what to write and keep coming back to political allegiances, thinking of all my friends with their red and yellow backgrounds to their Facebook posts, to the conversations I keep having about who the hell it is that keeps voting Tory. On the morning after the latest general election I went out for coffee with a friend, to celebrate the Tory humiliation, and mourn the fact that they're still in power. I don't know if that couple were Tories, the poem was originally about a friend, but I've changed it to bad mouth people I don't know. Sorry about that! Wearing our colours We went for coffee to celebrate, to commiserate, to pick over the bones of what was won, what lost, of who let us down and we wished that everyone had to dress in the colours that showed what they did. Then we would know who it was who didn't bother, who hid amongst us, for there had