Christina Sng's Official Poetry Website

While recovering from a particularly bad stomach flu and resting after the children had finally fallen asleep, “Freefall into Jupiter” came into being.

I write 3 versions and finally worked out a piece out of the second. It is one of the rare pieces that seemed to unravel itself and piece together on its own.

Will look at it again tonight and if it is all good I’ll be sending it out.

I am convinced my creativity is absolutely random. It comes and goes like an absent-minded house guest who has a skeleton key to my home.

Just one week ago I was raring to make miniature houses. A month ago I was making plush rabbits as fast as they reproduce in real life.

From 2002-2004 I wrote 5 poems every day without fail. My muse was in overdrive. I wrote like I was on fire.

In 2005, it ebbed to 5 a month and I discovered World of Warcraft and joined Sulake. All my creative energy was channelled to my job.

Then I got pregnant and in 2006 gave birth to my best creation (hang on, hubby wants to claim credit too) yet, my sweet son.

And today I feel like making nothing at all. In fact online retail therapy seems to be the order of the day.

I’ve always been a writer since I wrote my first poem at 5. It rhymed. That was about it. Then came the stories in high school, written in boring classes and later passed around my friends to read like a guilty trashy novel. All horror and science fiction, of course, with a touch of innocent teenage romance. I still have them!

I don’t know why I stopped writing.

Maybe it was the blast of creative energy I needed to inject for work. Maybe I had run out of tales to tell. Maybe I had exhausted all my angst and rage, now immortalised into those poems. The demons are all gone now. Poetry was therapy for me. A catharsis. And it was wonderful, so wonderful to be acknowledged by my peers for it.

Still, I took a ten year break from poetry when I first began at 5. Then I started again at 15 (yup, all that teenage angst in rhyme), began again at 29. Furiously. Maybe in another decade I will start again. Or maybe earlier if I gather up the 10 thousand words of The Flame and try to beat it into something worth reading.

I have spent the past few years reading. A new mother’s witching hour hobby. There are many new stories in me. The amazing real ones and those fantastic ones which entrap you between words.

Perhaps when my son sleeps through the night I will begin. As with every journey, every story begins with a single word.

A lovely mention on Mike’s blog (and my mug of our poem The Nightmare Avatar’s Nightmare and my reading on the SFPA’s Halloween page. If you haven’t grabbed a copy of it yet, run run and buy the H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror Issue #4 now.

I’m up to 4500 words on The Flame now, a speculative story I am writing. So far I hit 3000 on the first sitting – 6 hours – the ending was rather abrupt, says my kindly readers, so I revised it for expansion during another edit and sitting to 1500 words. As the plot is rather complex, I have had to lie down and poke holes in the plot. It troubles me when a story has glaring plot errors, never mind the factual errors, and I want to ensure I commit none of them.

Since it has been a zillion years since I have worked on a story this long – I got up to 30 pages once for a novel but that has been shelved after I got stuck and bored. The hard copy is still with me. Someday I might just take another look at it. At best it is another Interview with the Vampire, before I even read it. But that is another story.

Got a new mouse today. My fingers are getting friction burn from using the touchpad. And the true reason is I had spilled my honey green tea onto the keyboard causing some keys to stick together. Must Google to find solution. Speaking of which, bought a handful (literally) of Google shares. Glad I have made 5% already. Go Android!

Note: Just after I pressed Publish, the hubby signalled me that the baby woke up. He turned on the sidelight and true enough my little munchkin was sitting up rubbing his eyes. I walked to him, waving and said hey. To our delight, he waved back. It was the cutest thing!

It has been a long while since I touched poetry. There was that very thrilling creative online gaming job that I gave my all too, then there was my baby’s first year. As a creative person, I feel the need to constantly create, and writing has always been a part of my life.

Since reading Sylvia Plath’s latest biography (or rather Her Husband), I have been inspired to get back into gear and my first task is to organise all the poems I have written and published from 2000 into a single document, perhaps they can all fit a collected print edition finally.

There are a good 200+ poems published since I began writing some 7 years ago so this task of collecting them again (I lost 2 years worth of poetry from 2002-4 when my computer crashed without a backup) from copy and pasting the ones online and then the more tedious task of typing out the ones in print magazines.

I miss my old poetry friends and I realise to them, I must have fallen off the radar and could be dead for all they know. So if any of you are reading this, I am thinking of you and promise this time I will start writing and submitting again once I get the compilation thing complete. (There are even 2 publish-worthy poems in my notebook now and I am taking down notes for a few global warming poems waiting to be penned.)

It is heartwarming to Google myself and still find kind words on my poetry even after a 3-year hiatus. That is encouragement enough to continue my work.