Hi, my name is Rachel, and it's been two whole weeks since my last blog.
Or maybe I've confused this confessional booth with AA again.
National Poetry Month approaches, with its annual question: to join the NaPoWriMo challenge or not -- to scale the cliffs of a daily poem, or to sit back in the valley of artistic smugness and tell myself I'm too busy tweaking my manuscript to worry about new work.
Trouble is, last April, and the one before, and the one before that, I generated double the amount of writing that I have now considered keepers as in any other month of those years. There must be something to this drill.
Anyone else planning to take the NaPoWriMo challenge, and if so, are you doing it as part of a group, or solo? And if solo, what keeps you honest?
I wasn't strict about it last year; I counted two poems in one day for two days, started a day ahead of time out of anxiety and fudged the dates in my notebook. So I'm, as Tallulah Bankhead said, pure as the driven slush about NaPoWriMo. But I do try to keep up. And have published a few from the exercise. Maybe more than a few. (I'm still sending them out.)
In case you want to put a toe in the water, but would like some help, here's a site that offers daily prompts.
And if you decide to be above it all and focus on the manuscript, here's Poets & Writers' calendar of deadlines.