Keep Thinking about Manuscripts!

Even as I finished my blog yesterday and wrote a good four drafts of poems that are in the newer projects I am working on, I was still thinking about why it is I can’t seem to come up with a full length manuscript?

I mean, I did a thesis right? That was 48 pages long and I even sent it out a few times, heck it is actually technically still under consideration at a few contests but I quit sending it out because I knew it just wasn’t ready. I feel a bit overwhelmed by the thesis, and/or the older poems that are often very rooted in my childhood.  Not that they are all autobiographical but they live in that world in what some people call “juvenalia.” And I worry if I try to put that book together it is just going to be, what I sometimes term, “dead mother poems.” Because any writer who has had a parent die, especially when they were a teenager or younger, that parent is going to haunt some of their work.  And as I move on I’m not writing about it as much but the poems I really enjoy from my thesis are still in that world.

All this trying to convince myself not to work on it is all well and good but  there is still that pull where I want it to be.  There is something about saying you have a full length book. Some credibility it gives you.  I’m a goal oriented person and that goal just looms.  I’m so happy with my published chapbook and the other two I have circulating but the idea of a full length book is just so tasty!

So, after I got up this morning I looked at it again, focusing on the poems I have already had published.  I could make a manuscript, as I mentioned yesterday, but it isn’t where I want it to be.  Yet, the poems are so diverse that I don’t really feel like there are more I need to fill in or anything. Argh, what to do!

I think part of this issue is because I love to finish things and having so many “completed” poems that I am sending around to lit mags makes me feel a bit antsy. I know I could self-publish but I really like having an editor select my work and for that work to show up online and in print journals.  It is like winning a little contest or something

Ok. So I thought typing this out might make some more sense out of the whole process but it isn’t.  I think I’ll just keep working on the individual poems, sending them out and as more get published I’ll be back here again deciding what kind of future they have as a collection.

They are just not ready! I know this. I’m saying it again. But I am still scared about writing more poems and watching the pot of possible poems just grow and grow until I am having to dig myself out!

I guess there could be much worse problems to have.

Like the blank periods.

Yes, I have had them.

I need to go shop or something. To do something completely unliterary.

And maybe a sandwich could be involved.

Yum. Sandwiches.