Poetic Focus

Progress on The Hounds of Hell was practically non-existent today. I'm still hoping to have the energy to write at least the rest of the chapter I was working on once I finish up here.

My principal problem was that I couldn't sleep last night. This put me in a position of having a headache for most of the day that makes looking at a screen a challenge and a half. I've been avoiding writing this blog post all day for that very reason, instead focusing on part of what kept me awake so late in the first instance: poetry.

Last night, upon realising that it was Bed Time and I hadn't written a poem in the whole day, I started writing one. Forty minutes later, I put down my pen and did a line count: 120 lines. Rhyming. It took quite a lot out of me, and not just because it's an mini-epic of life and death.

Having written it, though, I couldn't sleep. When I then woke up, I wasn't sure if I could leave it there as the last poem I'd written. So, I wrote a happier poem, one about The World of Orange. That was followed by poems about exams and spelling and grammar, because there was something there that I could see, something I could take advantage of that was fun and simple and less miserable than last night's poem.

It didn't make me feel horrible to have written it, mind you, but it was a bit dark in places and I didn't want to just leave it there. I've been writing poems in the same notebook for the past couple of weeks, now, and I don't want there to be a wholly negative chunk of it as some form of conclusion. (Not that it's actually a sequence.)

This has, of course, all been part of my hopes to write more poetry, because I didn't feel like I'd written enough, or was writing enough. Now, I'm facing something of an opposite problem: I'm taking a huge focus on poetry, and not enough on fiction.

That is something I want to change, without sacrificing one for the other.

If I can manage it, I'd like to up the ante a bit. From tomorrow onwards, every day shall see me:

1. Publishing a blog post here.
2. Writing a poem.
3. Writing fiction.

Not necessarily in that order, of course, since the five poems I've written today were all completed before this post had even been conceived. (I'd planned on writing about "strong female characters", but my brain is too melted for that. Soon. Soon.) Tomorrow, I'll write a chunk of fiction - definitely enough to finish the chapter if I don't manage that tonight - as well as writing at least one poem and writing a blog post.

So yes, that'll be busy.

But it's a necessary busy-ness. I can't afford to not write fiction every day. It has to happen. I won't actually write enough if I don't write fiction every day. I'll probably have to take on Camp NaNoWriMo next month, too, to ensure I'm writing a ridiculous amount of fiction every day in an effort to destroy the deadline-target.

I've definitely got my work cut out for me, but this is the life I want to live. I just need to figure out the sleep thing, first. If I keep losing sleep (for some reason... I wish I knew) then I'm going to keep struggling with the writing. Fingers crossed, tonight I'll sleep, and my new daily writing plans can get under way.