I debated on uploading another speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, and horror) collection of published and unpublished stories and poems (one that collects mostly some of my very early stuff--and some newer stuff--from the days when I was a naive forty-year old writer who didn't know what a vanity press was). Despite this, I was proud of being newly published and these stories weren't that terrible at all, in fact, a few of them have been republished over the years, in more savory and paying markets.
I also considered that my literary poetry doesn't get much attention at all, and I don't really try to publish it (I tried early on to get into literary magazines, and it's very competitive, so I never made very many waves there). I joined groups to get better at writing poetry, and one of them was Post-it-Note-Poetry group on Facebook, or PiNP for short. Each February for the past several years, we post our post it note poems...short poems in screen shots and encourage one another in our efforts to become better poets. This led to me searching Pixabay and Pexels for images to use with my poetry...something I learned from my senior university professor, Dr. Trey Conner, is called multimodal poetry. I took his course in my last semester of my Bachelors of English program at University of South Florida-St. Petersburg and made that years' Post-it-Note-Poetry my first project where I used images consistently for every poem and wrote a poem every day. I posted them both to Facebook and our course Wiki page. Below is one of the poems from that year (2015), the first year I managed to write a PiNP every single day. I was as proud of that accomplishment as I was for graduating that spring Summa Cum Laude. Were they all good poems? Hell, no! Some were terrible. But I got over my fear of putting them out there for not one...but two...two audiences. Some of them, and some of my earlier and later multimodal poems are now out there for the world to see, with my online chapbook little paper parasols.
What does all this PiNP shit have to do with NaNoWriMo?
Patience, my young grasshoppers!
This past year, 2021's Post it Note Poetry was another gangbuster year for me. In fact, I blew 2015's year out of the damn water. I decided this year to focus on very short forms. Haiku, senryu (haiku that are not nature/season related), tanka, etc. I ended up writing over 130 poems in 28 days!
Some of them are very good. Quite a few of them. And, unfortunately, not all of them could be made into multimodal poems for PiNP that year. So, they are just sitting in a Google Doc file. Getting added to, every now and then, because even though the flow of words has stemmed some, I still get a day or two once in awhile where something comes to me. The rush of words will hit me like a tsunami again and I have to write. And now, I'm trying to write a new poem every day. I don't know if I can...and I don't push it.
So...after much thinking, I decided my NaNoWrimo project is going to be a book of recent short-form poetry...some of the PiNp stuff, and some of the stuff that never got a chance to be seen, and even some of the new stuff I've written since. I don't have a title for it yet, I don't know what poems I'm going to use for it, and I don't know how many... I have started a book project for it in Scrivener (novel writing application) and begun to arrange it a little bit. The only thing, I do know is that with the exception of some poems I wrote this past year called SHS (Short Horror Stories, actually poems that are horror poems--channeled a bit of EAP as well as William Carlos Williams this year) there won't be any other speculative poetry in it.
Because this is all stuff that I have already written, it would not be fair of me to treat it as a regular NaNoWriMo, where I post daily or weekly word counts to the NaNo website in the competition (with others and one's self) to complete the month with a 50,000 word novel. I am going to sign up so I can be a cheerleader for any of my writer friends who are participating and so I can get some tips on advanced usage of the novel writing and book formatting (paperback and e-book, but mostly for e-book) software apps Scrivener and perhaps Vellum. Vellum is a very expensive but easy to use (so I've been told) book layout/publishing program. Considering that it may be worth my while to invest in it. Scrivener's "compile" feature to create e-books (I haven't yet used it to create a paperback book for Create Space or any other paperback publishing venue yet) is a right royal pain in the ass. But it is super for planning your books, laying them out, and even storing your research, and cover images. Not to mention writing the actual book, which is really what Scrivener is for. I also use Scrivener to write some longer short stories.
So, now that I have that settled in my mind, I need to figure out which poems out of all my short ones I will publish in the book...then where I will place them.
Working out the kinks will be the tricky part, but at least I've my mind made up and got a start on the project for my first e-book of literary short poetry.
November, here I come!