Mirthful Sorrows: My First Book of Poems
Thanks for coming to my humble website. It was originally a blog, but it will switch soon to be my main page hosting my personal projects information, services, and food adventures (LittleLadyCook.com).
I still haven’t found the sweet spot to balance between writing at work (full-time marketing job), versus writing on my website, versus writing my books. It sounds like a straightforward task and I have come to terms with random periods of procrastination. That doesn’t mean some days are more challenging than others. Sharing this bit to show why the inconsistency of my publications.
When I get to find the sweet spot, I hope to hold onto it. In the meantime, I celebrate the little wins, such as it is publishing this small poetry book.
I wanted to share most of the poems I’ve written in my lifetime. But there is a price you pay when you are an inconsistent writer and when you relocate often. I don’t move around anymore. Something tells me I will either die in Maryland or Panama. Either way, there are poems I’m missing and if I ever find them, I might have a part 2 of this book. Mirthful Sorrows doesn’t need those poems to be what it is because it is a different kind of poetry. I wrote the poems I’m referring to when I was in my 20s, a different person then.
Mirthful Sorrows was born out of the intention of publishing a small compilation of my poems. I have a horror book coming up, and I realised I know nothing of the publishing process. As much as I listen to the brilliant Joanna F. Penn from The Creative Penn, still it doesn’t mean things will go smoothly and they did not. This tiny book gave me a lot of headaches. It got to the point that I was about to hire someone just to take care of the publishing on KDP Amazon. I’m still debating if dealing with IngramSpark so that in the future I can try to get indie bookstores carry it. I saw that many won’t carry books published through KDP.
Thanks to my husband’s patience and support, I overcame obstacles and published the paperback and kindle editions. Next, I plan to do the hardcover.
Mirthful Sorrows has poems that I have written in anger, desperation, happiness, and depressing moments. It has a lot of my cynicism, but it’s also hopeful. I know, a contradiction, welcome to my head.
About the book’s content:
I divided the book in four seasons, each with twenty poems and one chapter of a project I did in Panama years ago, the Animal Within. I did make some small changes to the Animal Within in the book, but I published the original project on this website.
Rain, Snow, Fire, and Ash are the seasons in this book and whether or not people understand my flow isn’t the question, I hope those who read these poems feel something. Numbness is one of the scariest feelings I’ve experienced. I would rather everyone hate my poetry than feel nothing for it.
There is an extra poem at the end of the book, that one and ‘Muerte’ are poems I wrote while I was in college, a very different JC back then.
This book won’t have any promotion, so only my friends and family might read it, and that’s fine. I’m willing to part with my soul for my horror books, and I hope my years of marketing knowledge will be finally pay off.
To purchase my book, please do so through Amazon. Thats the only place I’ll be selling it for now. Let me know if you get to read it, promise? 🙂
