I don't know how it feels like this year will never end and yet it's gone by quickly. Compared to last summer, I feel like this one is going by faster, especially June. June just came and went in a blur. I was busy all month scrambling to find a job and a place to live since my original plans were postponed due to covid.
But anyway, it's already halfway through July and I feel like this blog is overdue for an update.
If you haven't heard me shouting about this from all my social media channels yet, my first novel The One-Sided Coin has been published! It's been out for a month now and people have actually bought it! I was worried that I would release it to crickets, and while it hasn't been a overwhelming symphony, it's been a success and better than I had hoped!
You can read more about it here or watch the book trailer.
I'm also working on something special related to The One-Sided Coin that I hope to share in the coming months. Keep your eyes peeled!
As for the rest of June. . . I wrote one poem. It was a very dry month creatively. While I managed to write the first draft of what was supposed to be a novella in April and May, I just got overwhelmed in June by a lot of things and didn't have the energy nor the desire to create anything. I chose to accept this rather than fight against it. You can't always be in the midst of a productive season, and I needed to listen to what my mental health was telling me which was to take a break. It would've only made things worse to make myself feel bad about not writing.
So I've just been handling personal things but FINALLY the creative energy is coming back. Now that The One-Sided Coin is out, it's time to work on the sequel, right?
Well. . .
Don't worry, the sequel is going to happen, but I've been working on and off on my first full length poetry collection for about two years now and I'm still farther than I would like from completing it. I can't seem to juggle writing poetry and writing a novel at the same time because I always end up focusing more on the novel. Poetry is much more emotionally and mentally demanding to write than prose, and this full-length collection is especially difficult to work on. I've written all of the poems that come easily and am now left with the ideas that are harder to put on paper. Since it's so difficult, I've put off working on this project in the past, but it is important to me and I need to finish it.
I've told myself that I cannot start working on The One and the Other Volume Two (the project I've been dreaming about for the last 2-3 years) till I make SIGNIFICANT progress on my poetry collection. I don't quite know what that is. It could be that I work on this till I am too burnt out on poetry to write any more, or it could be I can only stop once the first draft of every poem is written. I don't know how many poems that will take, and I have also been revising old poems along with writing new ones. Not to mention I'm considering vastly changing the structure of this collection as well.
I want this collection to be ready to send to publishers by the end of the year, but I don't know if that's possible or how much work it will take. This might have to be my main project till it is finished, which makes me sad because I REALLY want to dive right into TOATO2.
As I mentioned earlier, I wrote the first draft of a novella which is a prequel to The One-Sided Coin. The prequel is about the character Labeth and occurs 180 years before the events in The One-Sided Coin. What was supposed to be a 20,000 word novella ended up becoming a 43,402 word short novel. I project that this book will end up being 50k-55k words once I'm done because I tend to have to add a lot of words to flesh scenes out. I'm thinking of printing out a copy so I can begin re-reading it during my lunch breaks at my new job.
That's all I have to say for now. I'm writing poetry till further notice, which means that I will have a lot more excerpts to post on my Instagram now. You should follow me there @marykgowdy if you want delicious sneak peaks into my poetry collection along with other unrelated poems. Here are some samples:
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We'll keep in touch. Stay safe!