World Poetry Day 2015

.
A poem for World Poetry Day, because time itself might be infinite, but ours really isn't.

Hope you enjoy.

Keeper  by  Jan Jones

Spinning quietly through the country
Sunlit lanes when we least expect them
Stopping for a time-slipped hour to
wander a ruined mill and picture the
men and boys all now gone

And I think, one day we too will be gone
and panic stirs in me and I bin the
diary and the calendar
and I disconnect my computer
and I turn off my phone
and I reclaim this one day for us
just us

To keep in my memory

Just because

.

Welcome back, Flora!

.

A new(ish) Jan Jones mystery!

Once upon a time, I wrote a 2000 word very clever short mystery story. So clever, in fact, that no one but me understood it.

It languished.

Then People's Friend wanted the occasional long mystery story. I resurrected Curtains (as it was titled then) and made it much longer. Too long, as it turned out, and still too complicated.

I rolled up my sleeves and got out the chain saw.

The 10K story was published in a People's Friend Fiction Special after MUCH sweating-of-blood on my part, now titled Behind Closed Doors.

Reader, I brooded.

The thing is - and I have this problem a lot - writers have a gut feeling for how long a story should be. If you try to stretch a story or squash it to fit someone else's column inches, it might still be a competent piece of work, but to my mind it suffers.

I brooded some more.

Then, along came Self-Publishing! And suddenly I could take my work and make everything the length it was always supposed to be all along!

So I went back to my several originals and reworked them and added a LOT more, and the result is What the Eye Doesn't See, a satisfying (to me, at any rate) 20K mystery featuring village shopkeeper Flora Swift.

Hope you like it!
.