The Writing Life

I've been catching up on some work today. About six thousand words of it. There's some handwritten material that needs to find its way into my laptop so I can craft a story around it. I've been working on a collection of short fiction now that my poetry collection is in production. And while the agonizing wait for the second print proof continues, I pour my energy into the short fiction. I'm not sure what I'll have at the end of it, but that's all part of the fun of writing. 

Three short stories are already written. Good first drafts. The material I'm working on now will eventually be a fourth, and then I will create a new story. I'm thinking five stories will be perfect and will enable me to have a nice arc for the collection. 

While creating the poetry collection, I worked with some editors who taught me a lot about crafting a collection that holds together and tells its own story. I had more than 200 hundred pages, including the three short stories that will go into the short fiction collection. Their advice - take out the fiction and allow the poetry to stand alone. Curate it so that my subject is focused in sharp relief and don't overwhelm people with too many poems. 

So that's what I did. It's taken about seven years for the poetry collection to birth. And now that it's happening, I'm ready to work more purposefully. My plan is to complete the short fiction in my 100 days of summer writing and work on publishing come fall. I'm not going to be rigid about it, but that's the plan. I have to keep reminding myself to stay loose.

I was away last week and an idea for a novel emerged. So, in the fall when I'm done with the short fiction collection, I'll see if the story is still alive for me. If so, there will be a lot of research. Part of what I love about the idea is I'll be able to learn about something that has grabbed my attention and is really interesting to me.  

I spent more time today than I'd planned working on the notebook to laptop transfer of material. It swallowed my day. And now it's regurgitated me to do this writing and get ready for other things that are coming up. Balance is elusive when I'm deep into something. 

The Great Summer Writing Retreat of 2019 continues. One hundred days of writing unedited ideas and following a prompt to its sometimes illogical conclusion.