So I'm limping along as far as NaNo is concerned. I noticed not too long ago that I was resisting in direct response to the amount of internal pressure I placed. I need to get to a place where I say to myself "I get to write a poem today" instead of "I have to".

Leafing through a lit journal today, I had the idea to reverse the literal meaning of each individual word, thus coming up with a vastly different poem than the one I was reading. So far, this seems to be a valuable vein to mine, though it's not as simple as I would have imagined. I'll post the first fruit of this labor as soon as I'm finished transliterating.

How go your writing goals?

Today, I've started a poem (& I really like the beginning), but today has been a wash in terms of energy & focus (especially as I suffered from insomnia the night before, I had to take the bus [read: spend a lot of time] to vote, & I've been watching election returns since then). So, I will take today as it is.

As I did the last time I tried to run this gauntlet, I will permit a bit of leeway. 30 poems in 30 days averages to 1 poem a day. The goal is to revive my writing as a habit. Some days, the Muse rewards me with more than a poem's worth of work. I look forward to those in the coming weeks.

Last year I participated in an offshoot of NaNoWriMo: insohaimo encouraged poets to write one formal poem every day of the month. It had been my intention all year to do so again in 2008, but somehow November snuck up on me.

Due to my seasonal job as an achievement test scorer, I haven't had a lot of free time to devote to the challenge, but I have scrounged up a few haiku in the interim. I have several days to make up, however.

( haiku )

Clasped like happy hands
the branch forgives the squirrel.
Tonight, the two sleep.

I'm finding things out as I progress through my poem-NaNo:

1. Iambs (and trochees) become easier to find/feel with practice.
2. It takes anywhere from 90 minutes to three hours to craft a sonnet (not counting any revisions).
3. Spenserian sonnets still rock my socks.
4. I still have yet to write a "real" sonnet (rigorous iambic pentameter throughout).
5. Even when I think I've gotten a sonnet down pat, I inevitably will find too few or too many stresses in one or more lines. That irks me! It always seems to be a smooth process when I'm crafting.

Let me know if you want to be on the filter for my NaNo story. I'll probably post the stories that came as ideas during the tail end of NaNo, too, when I finish posting the first.

(If you reply here, you'll be added. If you think you've missed any, you can go to my page and click on the nanowrimo tag to see them all in a group.)

Pistachios. You can't eat just 20.

In other news, I'm seriously debating whether to continue on with NaNo. My writer's block is huge, and it's just so frustrating when I've sat in front of my computer for hours and I've written less than a paragraph. I told dionysus1999 that I would slog my way through 'til the end of the month, and lameautarch is really trying to encourage me to continue. I'm just afraid it's a big exercise in futility. (My main problem is that the idea that formed the genesis of the story is so... unrealistic that to make it more realistic would require me to do a huge amount of research, and I don't feel I have enough time.)

I will post my word count meter only once a week or so.

Yesterday I joined wrimobuddies, but today I had to stop watching the community. It was just too much.

In other news, Student Finds Unpublished Plath Poem