Organizing Bounty

Every day, I write poetry, at least a thousand words in my current WIP novel, and a smattering of loose scenes, dialogues, plots, notes, and lines for as-yet-unrealized projects. In fact, I had a great idea for a meet cute a few months ago, but no story to go with it. Yesterday, out of the blue, I thought, “Obviously, the first third of the book will be epistolary.” And from there, the story unfolded as though it had been there the whole time.

Apparently, my increased focus and discipline on one project has opened the door for a bunch of creative ideas. I will, of course, accept them enthusiastically. It just means I have to be more selective with my time, and actually schedule the hours necessary to put these next two poetry collections together.

The first collection is one I’ve been thinking about for about a decade. Maybe 60 poems so far, maybe half of them needing revision. Another dozen ideas jotted down but not written yet. Is that enough poems for a book? Haha, it doesn’t matter! My editor doesn’t care. My editor just wants this shit done so she can move on to the next thing. (It me. I’m my editor.)

The second collection has just come together in the last two years or so, but the concept started taking a definitive shape last year around this time. It might have been Halloween exactly. The isolation of living where I do, where my best friend is my cat (I tell her frequently), combined with last year’s additional forced isolation made for some very nature-oriented and increasingly unstable verse. It will be fun to explore how to tell the story with them.

I’ve bargained with myself and have come to the conclusion that I will spend four full days focused solely on the first next poetry collection, as soon as I finish this novel’s “trash draft.” (As author Elizabeth May calls it, a shift in language that freed me from thinking the first draft had to be perfect and I could just write whatever I wanted and come back for an “actual draft” revision later. I’ll never be able to thank her enough, so help me out by buying her books too, I always do.)

Novel is now over 45,000 words. I think it’ll probably be over 70,000 when I’m finished in a few weeks, then it’ll be edited back down. I still love it, still want to spend every moment working on it. Actually, I’ve been getting really sad whenever I think that it’s almost finished, because then I won’t be creating it anymore. Beginning to suspect there’s something very unusual about me.