So, I’m not going to say much about this project—I’m trying to keep it under wraps until it’s done—but I for the purposes of accountability I wanted to mention that I’ve kept up with my commitment to draft one new poem every day. “Draft” is the operative word: often, I warm up by editing the work of the day before, tightening up the rhythms and polishing the wording, before drafting a new poem. I’m quite sure the manuscript will need some overall editing once I have drafted the full cycle of poems that will be in this collection, but for now, I’m contenting myself with this process. The edits help me sharpen my senses, and then drafting something new gets my juices flowing.
This is working in terms of reawakening some drive to turn to my fiction and work on it: so far, I have edited one story and submitted it to an anthology call (for horrific Christmas stories), and I’ve started looking at other things I have sitting in the “to submit” pile. I truly intend to focus my energies on longer work, but things have changed when it comes to novellas, with a kind of renaissance of novella-publishing kind of happening.
I’m also reading more than I have since the pandemic began, though I can’t credit the writing with that: I think being in a book club helped me regain some momentum and stamina in reading, and it helps that I’ve dug into both books I’ve long intended to read, and some new works that have been a pleasant surprise. I’ve also been plowing through some game books that I’ve meant to read for a long time, and am almost finished a series of reviews I started in 2017. (!) Those should be coming soon on this blog, though I plan to only publicize them in a single posting of the table of contents for the series. I have two such review series that are almost ready, but I don’t know how much interest people have in reading reviews of older RPGs, so in some ways it’s just a log for myself.
I’ve also been looking at the unpublished drafts on this website. It turns out I half-wrote a lot of posts—a few hundred, to be precise—and I’m sorting through which ones are worth editing and publishing, and which are just too out of date to matter (or to reflect my current thinking) anymore.
Anyway, all this is good news. I’m actually sort of regaining some writing and reading momentum. I hope that in my next update, I’ll be discussing how I read through the two novel manuscripts on my desk at work, and have begun editing the manuscript so it’s ready to shop around. We’ll see, but that’s my hope.