This is another update on my WIP, mostly intended as an accountability post. I’ve kept up my work on the project, and have hit 58 poems. I thought I would be finished in a couple of weeks, but one of the poems I thought would be shorter ended up being a very formal experiment in internal rhymes, which is very tricky, and also ended up unexpectedly expanding into a long poem with multiple parts: of my 58 pieces, six are sections of this newly-extended poem.
So… if I keep up my current pace, I probably have ten days more of drafting left to go, before I circle back and start in on edits. Of course, I’ll probably pick up my pace between then and now, as the winter intensive course I’m teaching class will be coming to an end soon. But you can’t rush verse, at least not if you want good verse.
That said, I also hope to get some work done on one of my novel drafts this winter, so I’ll be balancing this project with that, along with revisions on a book translation my wife and I are wrapping up with the editors publishing the book. Still, I expect to have a rough manuscript in a little more than a week, and that feels like an achievement. I’ve started thinking about how in the world I can find a publisher for it, but I figure I’ll edit it into the best shape I reasonably can first, before worrying about that.