Hello.

First, I thank the hosts for running this marathon. I imagine that it takes a lot of time to set up the infrastructure for the event and I applaud them for their vision, effort, imagination, and passion. You never know where the ripples in the waves will go when you toss a stone into the river. I hope that they are happy with the waters from their first stone that have now washed over this year’s participants in the marathon.

I am a recent retiree, leaving the work force after forty some years of full-time employment, the majority of which were in the IT industry. Upon my retirement, I decided to focus on the many projects I had put off over the years due to the demands of the everyday job, home life, and my volunteer activities with numerous local organizations. My wife and I sold our house in a northwest suburb of Chicago and moved to a townhouse in a more rural community and with far fewer responsibilities.

My first project was to complete a non-fiction book on writing songs with the ukulele. The chapters for the book grew from my years of playing the ukulele and participating in a local ukulele club. I also spent many years running a local monthly song writing Meetup group where we exchanged our original songs for enjoyment, evaluation, and critique. I completed and published a print and ebook version of my book on Amazon two years ago and have moved on to new projects. I’m not sure what the featured image is all about but I uploaded my book cover image for it. Is that a dumb thing to do?

My current effort revolves around the creation of a number of stories in the genres of magical realism, science fiction, and the supernatural. I created a fictional town that I named Sandy Shore and the stories have inter-related plots and characters all in and around the town. I am in the process of completing second and third draft rewrites on a number of the stories and am looking to compile them into two separate publications.

I would not characterize myself as a poet. However, over the years, I have won several local poetry contests (to be fair, I’m not sure there was much competition) and now complete a poem every few months or so. This marathon will be a challenge for me, though I am bolstered by the fact that the focus will be on completing a poem an hour, not completing a great poem and hour.

As I’ve never done anything remotely similar to this marathon, so I don’t have much in the way of preparation plans. I imagine just staying up for the twenty four hours will be a major difficulty for many people but I’m not seeing that as an huge problem as I often am up till three or four am and going the extra six hours will be a challenge but not insurmountable.

As far as the poems, what I plan to do before Saturday morning is to list at least twenty-four topics for me to base my poems on. During the marathon, I will be using my ukulele and guitar to strum along on the beginnings of each pome to help free my thoughts. I find that linking my texts to music liberates a level of creativity. We’ll see how that works.

I’m not sure of the process of posting the poems. I suppose we use this function to do so. I guess we click the Marathon Poem category when we post?

Good luck, everyone. I look forward to seeing your posts.

Tim