Strange

Right now I am reading Jeffrey Skinner's book, The 6.5 Practices of Moderately Successful Poets and I am struck by some advice he gives early on in the book. 

He states among other things:  Give Yourself Goals.  Have a plan.  I will edit a manuscript by this date. 

That last thing there is strange because I actually gave myself a goal to have written and be finished with a manuscript by the end of 2012.  I had given myself this deadline in order to capitalize on my energy and desire to write a manuscript detailing a lot of the stories I had heard about my home town while growing up, and many more on top of that. 

Wait.  That's not the strange part.  The strange part is that I ended up writing a book which was entirely different than the one I imagined.  My original idea was to explore the narrative poem, with small, lyric poems to be placed intermittently throughout the book.  What ended up happening is a book of lyric poetry with narrative elements in a good deal of the poems.

 As it turned out, the harder I squeezed my brain to wrap itself around the task of writing these narrative poems, the more I slipped into the groove of writing lyric poems.  I was, in effect, writing a book behind my own back.  In  the end I have a manuscript which will be ready to submit by January, 2013.  I can hardly wait to start gathering my stack of rejection slips and for that one special acceptance note.


More news soon on the publishing front, I am certain.  Trust me, it's good news.