Valiant Efforts

As of two days ago, I’m gathering the poetry that would be the first third of my next collection and I’m preparing bits of it to be sent off to contests and magazines. That seems to be the next logical step in my writing career, since I’ve already published a few collections. Really, I’m partially hoping to shift my actual writing time focus to the two novel drafts that have been sitting on my desktop, collecting dust.

This won’t be a stingy effort, though. I’m not sending these offspring of mine to never see the light of day again. Some of them, I’ll be sharing here, as I have in the past. Others will be hidden inside the little file icon that does hide my work from sunlight. At least, that will be the way it is for now.

What we’re talking about is around 60 poems, a good chunk of what I normally publish in a book. These contests, understandably, but also somewhat unfortunately, require poetry to not have been published if you want to submit for review. I have mixed feelings about that. It is a fact, though, that I’ve been writing more recently, especially poetry, than I have in a long while. Probably putting more content, stuffing more words (meaningful words!) into my works than any collection before.

There is a name for this particular upcoming collection of poems. I like to call it “Dark Side of My Ribs”. To say that it is just a collection of poems is kind of misleading, as well. They are not labeled as such, but at somewhere around half of these pieces are being written as lyrics. I know those two things are closely tied together, but they definitely hold a special place in the artistic world.

I have a melody and accompaniment in mind when I write a lyrical piece. In my head, there’s a band playing along with what’s going down on the page. We all know what lyrics are, but I feel like it is fair to state these have tighter boundaries than poetry. It adds a different sort of flare and an inspiration that is fed from another direction.

Honestly, even though this is a small detail, I’m really excited to be working on this book in this way. It helps to keep things moving forward despite my mood or mindset.

In a novel, at least traditionally, you really don’t get to play around so much. There are outliers, which I hope to include in my future portfolio, but really most lengthy texts aren’t formatted in creative ways, and don’t include song and dance.

At any rate, I figured this was a development I should post about, since I’ve been talking about my slow growing career as an author here for a while. I mean, this is my own personal domain. The place where I am lord.

Before I continue down a path of lofty ideas, I’ll call this post here. Thanks for reading, as always, and if you enjoyed my rambling, please check out my Books page for all my works, poetry and novels.

Alex