Day Ten of National Poetry Writing Month - a progress report
Well now, how are we doing here? From Thursday night to Tuesday morning, I took time off from non-paid-job desktop screen time. I just couldn't spend much more time at this desk I have set up in my bedroom, as cozy as my set up is.
But, just as many things do, my energy and enthusiasm for this project I've embarked upon this month came flooding back when I fell asleep early on Monday night, woke up early on Tuesday morning, and couldn't get back to sleep again. So I set to work on one of those columns you see there in the bullet journal spread I'm using to keep track of my progress: typing.
Long Hand First
For prose, I usually type everything from the get-go. But for poetry, it is usually my habit to write out a poem in longhand first. The kinetic experience of using my fancy curliqued writing is part of the art-making process for creating poems, for me. This often means that I have a lot of lost or abandoned poems lurking in my zillion journals. Or that a whole manuscript will be in notepad sheaths, small notebook loose leaf pages, tiny journals I made from scrap paper, and poems pulled from a separate manuscript that seem to work better in this current one instead.
What I'm saying is the current manuscript I'm working on is a total freakin' mess and I'm glad I have this poetry month challenge at hand to get me to set about the legwork of making a tidy, typed manuscript with a pretty little table of contents and all.
So! After having no checkmarks in the "Typed" column, I am all the way caught up to today (7am on Tuesday, April 14) and one revisions (see previous post).
What's Next?
Well, you see the little flags on those three composition books in the photo? Each one is a poem that I don't think I've typed yet. And I also have the loose leaf papers and notepad papers in the current half-typed manuscript to work through. So I at least know what I want to get through!