News:

Nothing this week.

Works in Progress:

In the effort to continue giving my brain a bit of a break, instead of starting immediately on the next project, I decided to take out the next poetry collection, put everything together, and polish it up for eventual publication. I’d hoped to put it out this fall, actually, but between financial considerations and exclusivity for a few of the poems (as well as some still being on sub, although I’m not sending out any more), I think it’ll be best if I wait until next year.

However, I am ridiculously pleased with A Nightmare for All Seasons as a collection. It’s four seasonal sections, two of which are segmented long poems and the other two of which are mini collections:

• Verdant with Splinter and Thorn: mini collection of 11 poems
• The Lusty Murders of May: segmented long poem, one piece per day in May
• The Halloween Parade: mini collection of 15 poems (I posted the title poem last Halloween to herald in the season)
• Bleak Midwinter: segmented long poem, one piece per day in December

By the time I have everything ready to put into the path of publication, I may add a few more poems to the mini collections if the appropriately themed pop up in my daily poems or on a whim, but I’m not planning for it. Dead Ends had more of my flash poetry in it, mostly because I like making a concise point and sometimes a punchline, and because Dead Ends emerged from a common theme I write rather than a concerted effort to write for a theme, like A Nightmare for All Seasons. Like the difference between assigning my short works to a potential future collection based on broader themes I keep writing and my Bathroom Omens collection, which I specifically wrote short stories (and some poems) for. As a result, a lot more of the poems in the mini collections are longer, two to three pages, and more narrative, like the two long poems.

Now, I’ve been committed to writing poetry for the last three years (four, if you count lyrics), and I learned about poets and their works in English Lit classes. But try as I might, I do not know what makes good poetry. I know what I like, and I understand correct structure (at least where structure is used), but I don’t know whether I’m good or how to improve, no matter how much poetry I read (and I sometimes just don’t like what some call good, so I trust that it’s good, just not for me). All I can really do is what rings right and clear in my brain. It’s disorienting, feeling as though I’m reading some of my best poetry, but most were soundly rejected by poetry markets, and I wouldn’t know a masterpiece from a marketplace.

Regardless, I’m very happy with the latest draft, and I’m looking forward to when I can pull it back out again, either to submit to a call for collections or to publish it myself. In general, I’m amenable to publishing my own collections, poetry or short prose, because they tend not to be as profitable for publishing companies.

After I put A Nightmare for All Seasons aside, I started work on what I had hoped would be a gothic body horror novelette and which now looks like it’s going to be a gothic horror novella (I’ve crossed 15K words and think I’m only halfway through), with not enough body horror to qualify for the subgenre and therefore no longer appropriate in theme or length for the call I’d hoped to write it for. However, since The Damp (formerly Ooze) has been swimming around my head for over a decade as something I want to write (like Masque), I’m not frustrated by writing it without a market (although I’m disappointed I won’t have something for the body horror novelette call).

What I am frustrated about is that I don’t feel like I have a handle on the story, even while I barrel forward. I don’t know how factual my feelings are, but I feel like I’ve been writing badly very well for a while, not just The Damp. And by that, I mean that on the sentence level, I’m on fire, but not on a character and plot level. Maybe I need to write badly and character and plot will improve? Yeah, that sounds like a plan. (It does not sound like a plan.)

This may be a case of hating the writing while I’m in it but thinking it’s workable by the time I get around to editing it—which usually hits midway through the writing. It may also be a simple case of pressure, because I need the money, yet my writing is not making me money because this is the year of rejections, and of course that will make me question the quality, even though I reread through pieces and don’t know what I’m doing wrong (and I’m usually better at quality discernment with prose). Desperation and insecurity breed low self-esteem, after all.

Nevertheless, all I can do is what I’ve been doing and hoping it’s right in spite of myself. I expect the word count on The Damp will be around 30-35K instead of the 15K I’d planned for. Which is another mental issue, because I hit 15K and end of August when I wanted to be finished, so my brain is like, Welp, I’m finished. And I am not finished. Aiming for finishing by end of Labor Day now. (Think I can reach 20K by end of day?)

Then day or two off and jumping straight into the Dracula reimagining, which I’m going to try writing in a new way, not just with an outline but maybe even out of order, working outward from a central story line, and adding supplemental material afterward as needed. These are interesting times.

Things I’m Reading:

Why Didn’t You Just Leave edited by Nadia Bulkin and Julia Rios
Needful Things by Stephen King

Things I’m Listening To:

The Village soundtrack
Stigmata soundtrack
Nightwish instrumentals

Things I’m Watching:

Pumpkinhead
The People Under the Stairs
Unsolved Mysteries (Netflix) series
CSI: Miami series
Abbott Elementary series
Great British Baking Show series
White Collar series
Supernatural series
Grey’s Anatomy series
Kitchen Nightmares series
America’s Got Talent series
Murder, She Wrote series

Poem of the Week:

standing on the edge of a cliff
wondering if you should try
to change your point of view
madness isn’t a push or plunge
but a numb sweaty-palmed descent