Handwriting Has Its Uses

So I discovered that my pages of poetry count is low. I was expecting to have to have 15-20, when actually it's 36-48. Needless to say, a bit of panic set in. Not as bad as it could have though, since I had already gone through and tried to order my manuscript and discovered that there were holes in it, so I knew I needed more.

I also discovered that my book isn't about my grandma, like I originally intended it to be. It's about me. The family poems are really only informing the poems about me. It's still telling the story I intended, but it's in a different way than I expected. It's kind of like: all this stuff happened, so that might be why I am the way I am. Maybe it's genes, maybe it's fate, maybe it's men.

I didn't really intend to write a man-hating book. Okay, it's not really man-hating. It's just that the women in my family didn't always have the greatest luck. Prime example: my great-great grandfather killed his wife. So yeah. It kind of became about how all the women in my family connect to me. It's hard to explain. I'm still kind of figuring it out. It's been very interesting as far as learning more about myself goes though. It really makes you take a good look, that's for sure.

So anyway, with this higher number of required pages, I have really started to buckle down. I've been having trouble writing anything in the last month or so, so I decided to take a different approach. I hate writing by hand, but I made myself do it, and I actually found a fondness for it that I'd forgotten. There's something satisfying about writing things down, marking through them, adding notes--getting to see the whole process visually, whereas, on the computer, you delete stuff, and it's just gone. Writing it on a notepad has actually been kind of nice. It's something new, at least, and I've already written four new poems this week with it, and at least two were worth keeping. The others might turn out to be as well, but we'll see.

The only thing that sucks is that now that I know where the holes are, I have discovered that I need at least one or two poems about things that I don't know if I can approach in a way that will make any sort of a decent poem. But I guess I have to try. And try I will.

Back to the notepad.