Here’s another little accountability post, following up after about a month and a week on this project, and a bit less than a month since my last post about it. I’ve kept at it! Indeed, I’ve picked up the pace. At the moment, I have 49 complete poems, which is because I’ve actually written more than one a day for certain days.
Some of the poems are multi-part pieces, including a couple of “long poems” that included ten or more parts, but I’m counting each section as a poem for the purposes of tracking my progress. I’ve enjoyed exploring some forms I hadn’t been interested in exploring in the past, having composed an acrostic poem, a “golden shovel” with a pretty hilarious source text, and a few forms of my own devising. In the queue is a chant royal and a dizaine, both forms I’ve never written before. The cycling through forms is a bit scattered, but I’m focused on generating the material first, knowing that I can always smooth it out and integrate it a bit better later on if I decide the shifts are too jarring.
At the moment, there are thirteen poems in the queue for this to be semi-complete. I’ll probably add a few more just to round out the collection and the narrative arc it explores—yes, this is narrative verse, sort of anyway—but it’s still heartening that if I keep up my pace, I should have a pretty complete draft finished in a few weeks. Then, of course, the revisions will begin, whcih I expected to be a little more time-consuming as verse requires a pretty intense degree of polishing.
I’m not currently thinking about who would be interested in publishing such a work, given the amount of time I anticipate needing to put into revisions. (I also expect to show this work to a few friends for comments in the process of revision, though it may be a challenge to find people interested in verse now, who would also be interested in a project as idiosyncratic as this one. We’ll see, I guess.) Publication would be nice, in the end, though… it’s just that I’m not thinking about it too much for now, because if I do I’ll get anxious about publishability and that risks discouragement that I would rather avoid till this is done. It is, after all, my first completely new writing project (aside from game design/development) in a few years.
Anyway, it’s still coming along…