Today, I repeated the same ritual as last year. Foraging through google docs and running blog entries, through dropbox folders and random files, to assemble and print out the year's writing output. Closing up the year, I was well aware I was not as productive in my exploits as 2018, when I finished the year with around 150 new pieces spread across various projects--and the better half of two different book manuscripts. While last year, sometimes the only things that kept me going through grief was that daily writing. So maybe I needed it less this year. so it didn't always happen. I would chug away on a project sometimes then drift away--get busy with other things at the start of my day. All the while, I kept telling myself it was okay to not be producing so much and that it'd be better served by slowing down. Though occasionally the panic of that lack of production would set in, as it always did during fallow periods. Especially in light of many half-finished projects and ideas that sit idling for years sometimes (this is true of visual art as well.)
When I printed them all out this afternoon, I found close to 80 pieces written this year, across 5 different series--nothing to scoff at to be sure, and certainly more than I was tallying in my head. This also did not include the last batch of zodiac poems I can never keep track of, so probably approaching 100 more likely. Poems about changelings and body image, about serial killers and mass extinctions. With so much in flux this past year, and the niggling feeling I am doing so much, but only a little bit well, I am happy to see something solid and good to show for it, especially since my visual exploits have been more stagnant outside of cover designs. I've never been much for numbers for the sake of numbers, but I'm aware that the higher number of things you write in a year, the better for the actual quality--like running laps or situps--even the less inspiring ones make you stronger.
I will do another beginning of the year post with what's on par creatively for 2020 (though looking at last year's, I barely scratched a lot of surfaces.) I hope to continue my latest string of daily writing in January (though I am taking some time off while I am on vacation to turn to some editing & compiling these next two weeks.) Publication-wise, there is the release of Sex & Violence to look forward to in April, as well as some fragments from unusual creatures that will turn up in the next Tupelo Quarterly. (and that project itself a squirrely mass that needs to be tended to when I can concentrate on it.)
