Updates and Affmirations

Last night was rough. I did not sleep well and have not slept well for about two weeks or more. My partner snores and, as much as I love him, I’m going to have to sleep on the couch for the foreseeable future because I need more than four hours of sleep every night.

But, putting that aside, I am excited to announce that the rough draft of book one of The Olympic Fates Saga is almost done! It’s taken a bit of detour that I didn’t anticipate, but which is giving my characters so much more development. Especially Menelaus and Helen. So I am loving watching the story unfold. It’s currently at about 48,000 words, which means the completed manuscript will likely clock in around 60,000 words total.

I’m still working on it and it is still on track to release to Kindle Vella on the 1st of April.

Yesterday and today, though, I was reminded of something that I already know and keep ignoring: I am meant to write poetry. I joined this amazing group on Facebook called The 365 Poetry Prompt Challenge and I have been writing so many poems in response to these prompts! Some of them aren’t the greatest, especially if I have to utilize a specific rhyming pattern (I’m terribly with rhymes), but there are several that I am really proud of.

One of the admins of the group told me today that I am meant to be a poet; she asked if I was going to publish a collection of poetry and, after telling her I already have one collection published, I said that yes — I am hoping to publish many more volumes of poetry. I’m still submitting Sonnets for Post-Divorce Photosynthesis for publication consideration at different book publishers, as well as trying to get some of the individual sonnets published, too. And now, after writing something like 15 poems in the last two days, I am looking ahead to potentially putting together a second volume of poetry this year.

In 2020 I gave myself the goal of writing 150 new poems for the year, and I exceeded that by some distance. I did not give myself the goal of writing a specified number of poems in 2021 or 2022 because I was 1) celebrating the publication of my debut poetry collection, Even the Air, Too Heavy, and 2) either completing my M.F.A. in Creative Writing or starting my M.A. in Literature and so I was focused on other goals. And then in 2023 I was finishing up my M.A. in Literature, so I didn’t make a poetry writing goal for that year, either.

Now, I am making a conscious effort to write 200 new poems for this year. It’ll be hard, considering how much other writing I’ll be doing, but when I write poetry, my writing improves exponentially to when I am only writing prose. And I would really love to reach the end of 2024, look at the 200 poems I’ve written, and say confidently that I wrote at least 3 new full collections of poetry this year. (A full collection of poetry starts at a minimum of 40 pages.) If I can write 3 books of poetry and 3 novels, I’ll have written 6 full books this year and that will make me outright ecstatic.

And look, it isn’t really about the number of books released (although that is part of it); it’s about the ability to say that I gave myself a seemingly insurmountable goal, and I accomplished it. Each goal we set and then achieve is one more level we’ve conquered in this writing game. And the more levels we conquer, the more our writing and creative selves improve. That doesn’t mean your writing goal has to look like mine. Perhaps your insurmountable writing goal is to finish the rough draft of a book. Or maybe it’s take an already completed manuscript and submit it to agents or publishers.

The point is that we should always be challenging ourselves more and more every year. That’s the only way we can become masters of our craft.

So today, let’s affirm ourselves and each other: we can reach our goals.