in january i started keeping a regular writing time--tuesday evenings, for a couple hours after zu goes to sleep, and it was a wonderful success! i wrote SEVEN very workable drafts! i'm so happy to have such a head start on my overall writing goal for the year (20 poems).
much of the inspiration was due to the fantastic persona poetry class i took--highly recommend it--of course producing mostly persona poems. its made me think of taking my book in a slightly different direction. so now i'm deciding if i should shelve my book for now or continue sending it out. i sent out to 8 contests last year and have already received rejections from 3--so maybe wait it out for now, then revise after receiving more rejections? i don't have much time to dig into the manuscript intensively at the moment, so this is something i can ponder for a while.
this month i'm planning on working on revising individual poems, especially those i wrote in january, during my regular tuesday writing time (in addition to getting caught up on some poetry reading--its always good to recharge!) and on sunday evenings.
i have 41 unpublished poems that i want to take a close look at and assess whether they are worth submitting, scrapping, or revising; my editing schedule may sound intense, but i won't spend an equal amount of time on each poem, some need it more than others.
revising schedule~
feb 12 - 4 poems
feb 19 - 3 poems
feb 24 - 4 poems
feb 26 - 4 poems
six poems per revising night is the goal; since some won't take as much time as others, i imagine some nights i'll get ahead, some behind (i'll likely keep up with it here for my own ocd organizing needs).
of course, among the revising, i'll continue reading (louise gluck's collected and various interlibrary loans) and taking notes. in march i'm taking another poetry class--the fairytale poem!--so it will be good to be caught up on revision before (hopefully!) producing a whole nother slew of new poems
I can't wait for our fairytale class! The fact that you wrote so many amazing poems after taking the persona class makes me very excited for hopefully producing some usable material in the fairytale class. =)
ReplyDeleteLove the idea of a revising night. I need one of those (in fact, right now I could use a whole revising week). Congrats on finding that tricky balance of mom-time and writing time.
ReplyDeleteoh it works for now, but when that second baby comes, all bets are off!
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