Back to My Book

I left my book for a week or so, but finally returned to it today. Of course, I had to read the last few chapters over to remember what was happening before I plunged ahead. I just finished writing and typing Chapter 20. These are short chapters, so it isn't as impressive as it sounds. But I think I'm at the halfway point. I don't have a detailed chapter-by-chapter outline, so I don't know for sure. But I'm at the point where the story will keep following its own inexorable destiny. Even though my semester is so pleasant, I wish I could have a few weeks of undisturbed time just to finish up this first draft so I'd have it all down on paper. This is when I need to remember that my sister wrote a full draft of a longer novel than this during National Novel Writing Month last November while working at a much more demanding job than mine.

My main distraction these days isn't my job, anyway. It's poetry. It's all I want to do. I get up and spend the first, best hour of my day trying to craft sonnets about lost love. It's actually a good use of my time, all things considered. What better way to spend one's time than writing sonnets? I don't think anyone on her deathbed would regret time spent writing sonnets. Some of mine don't observe a formal rhyme scheme, but the one I wrote this morning did - it was a Petrarchian sonnet with the ABBA, CDDC, EFEFEF rhyme scheme. How I pored over those rhymes to get them right, even if the last line still doesn't please me completely.

AND I just signed up to give an hour-long poetry reading (!) at the Innisfree Poetry Bookstore and Cafe, here in Boulder, one evening in late May. So I NEED to get busy writing more poems, correct?

So today I wrote a chapter and wrote a sonnet. I would call this a very good day.