Dry Amusements & Novel Stuff

In which i go meta on my own work. Kind of. I used to write poetry pretty often. Way back in 2006 I did over 500 in a year (the genesis of this blog, in fact) and did a 30 poems in 30 days and poem an hour for 24 hours once as prior experiments as well. I did write poems in 2007 but slowly petered off, to the point that my ones from 2009 onward languish on my computer without having been printed out.

This is only interesting because I have been posting older things on tumblr, having gone through 2004 and into 2005, ignoring the longer ones -- most of them being, in retrospect, not that good at all. The differences are interesting. 2004 was a mishmash of styles and influences, whereas 2005 is largely rhyming poems, many of them relatively challenging and some needlessly complicated. Some of them are decent. Most, I think, suffer by being constrained too deeply into restrictive styles.

I tend to post a poem a day, mostly because I will run out eventually, but it is nudging me into writing small bits of poetry again though I tend to view the results thus far as not that good at all. I may have to do a poem-a-day project soonish just to find out if that spark is, mostly, gone. It shall wait until the current novel is doing before I really think about it.


In better news, the draft of Ghoulish Happenings has passed 53K. It's worked out to roughly 1K a day of 'finished' material though I have a series of notes on some characters and things posted to this blog that need to be fixed. None of that is major and much of that has been incorporated into the latter part of the book (Post 40K). As the last third of the book is plotted out in very loose terms -- meaning I know the ending but the details of getting to it are a bit sketchy -- I suspect this draft will count as 'done' sometime by the end of February.

At which point I shall give thoughts to the sequel, which I've begun to write. It was going to be a short story submission to a zine but I realized there is no way I was going to make the deadline for submissions and figured that having a first chapter as a short story is probably a good idea anyway for a novel. As long as it connects to the larger plot of course.