I used to berate myself if I didn’t do any writing-related work during a day, but things have moved on: I now feel unsettled if I haven’t done enough. I keep a log of where I spend my creative time; perhaps this is a little sad, but it keeps me honest! My target is four hours per day. In December, my average was 3.2 hours.
Given such a benchmark, I can say with confidence that yesterday was a little below par effort-wise, even though it went pretty much as I had expected it would. This included the final work on the Graeme Ryan’s revised collection, Valley of the Kings (probably available from c. 12th January). The updated edition of my own A Pattern of Sorts should be available now.
There will be no problem hitting my ‘effort target’ today as I’ve a two-hour on-line North Yorkshire Stanza poetry meeting this evening. I run my own Stanza group too, and we meet next week, so there’s a little final prep to be done there – as well as some publicity at some point this week about the fourteenth Contextual virtual poetry event towards the end of the month. In addition to that I aim to finish the first half of this round’s revision of “Tilt” as well as more work on “B”, “C” and the drafting of workshops & courses.
As far as the latter is concerned, I’m aiming to cover subjects such as form in poetry, character building in prose, and monologue vs. dialogue. I already have a workshop on Found Poetry which always goes down well!
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Ian Gouge - Writer 