Expectations by Regina Horne Beard

Expectations is a collection of thirty poems written from 1989 to 2004 and was published July 2013.  The earliest poem, "Make Believe," was written while I was in high school.  I was one of those geeky girls who carried around a notebook of poetry.  I was always adding a new poem to it - almost daily.  I was also shy and didn't share them with many people.  Most of the poems in Expectations were written while I was an undergraduate for a creative writing course I was taking at the local community college.  The feedback was very encouraging.  I had always known that I wanted to write poetry and stories, but I never really knew if I was good enough to share them on a professional level.  Expectations is the testing ground.  It has only been published for a few months, but the reactions I've received so far have embolden me to write more.

Over the  years I had played with the idea of publishing.  I have stories I've been working on for a while, but nothing worth sharing with the world.  I also wanted to finish graduate school, and to be a published author takes a great deal of time, a valuable commodity when chasing a master's degree.  Early this year I revisited the idea of publishing again and have been enticed by what the eBook community could provide.  Having control over my work is paramount and the opportunity presented itself to make publishing a reality.  I gathered my poetry, placing them in order.  Then I created a cover page.  Once I was satisfied with the aesthetics, I held my breath and clicked on "publish."  Within a few weeks, it was available online for $2.99 from various online book sellers including BookTango, Amazon.com, Google Books, and iBooks - just to name a few.

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to blog about the poetry in Expectations and explain some of the meanings and background of the poems.  If there are any poems in particular you want to know more about, please, don't hesitate to contact me or visit my website.  I'll be glad to talk about any part of my work.

The book trailer for Expectations:


Until then...Happy reading!