This weekend, I spent a bit of time updating my main website, kayeboesme.com. I switched from a hard-coded HTML5 site to a WordPress-based one. Pangrammatike will still be the place where I blog about writing, though — I love the name of this blog, and it feels cozy.
The “Read My Work” and “About Kaye” tabs have been updated with new information. You’ll also note that I have titled the page Kaye Boesme · Poet & Creator. While I love fiction and the process of working out a story, poetry is my stronger medium, so I have decided that it is my area of focus in promoting my work for the moment. This will change once I publish my novellas, but for now, poet is the clearest expression of the work people can expect to find.
One of the things I have been wrestling with in January (and now, the first week of February) is my decision at the beginning of 2021 to single-task and how that relates to the several projects that I have in “active” mode rather than “back-burner” mode. I’m thinking about whether I want to keep chugging on The Seven Papers during my dedicated Wednesday and Thursday writing time or if it would make more sense to focus on small wins — the novellas that won’t take me that much effort to finish drafting in comparison to the monumental project. Along with that, I have also considered whether that’s just a type of procrastination. The answer is probably yes, and besides, there are a few things I’m working out with the plots of those novellas that are not satisfying to me yet.
Alongside this, I have made substantial progress on the religious poems I decided to write this year, but less project on the speculative poetry book because I need to do some background reading for that and the research books are behind a few other things in my queue.
My January word count in my main writing project was 10,000 words. I wrote five poems and took down some verse snippets that were in my mind — and some imagery and references to myths — to seed more poems. There is a sixth poem that I have in draft mode because it is, to be frank, a mess.
This month, my plan is to focus on completing that messy poem, working on The Seven Papers, and incubating some thoughts about my speculative project. In March, I will evaluate where I am to see if I should complete one of the novella drafts that month, but that depends on how much momentum I have with respect to my main writing project and whether it seems sensible to make that shift. I’ve already done 2,000 words of The Seven Papers this month so far.
January involved working hard to shift some habits and clear out a lot of things that were in progress, so I have lain the groundwork to do well this month. When I was ready to get into my Wednesday and Thursday writing sessions, one of the hard things was how I haven’t spent a 3.5 hour chunk of time on writing in so, so long — but during one of those January sessions, I literally wrote about half of that month’s word count. I’m considering dividing the time into 1.75 hour chunks, with the first for prose and the last for poetry.
At February’s close, it will be interesting to evaluate whether those efforts have fully paid off or if there are still things that I need to tweak.