A-Drafting I Did Go

53º ~ the trend for above average high temps continues, am trying to embrace the lasting heat in case the winter turns longer, colder, and wetter than normal again this year, while we crave more rain, the light is lovely as it slants all autumn-wise through thinning tree branches

Woo Hoo, Dear Reader, I'm riding the high of having drafted today after several weeks on an upset schedule.  As I've said before, those scheduling upsets weren't necessarily bad, but I still feel off kilter when I haven't drafted in a while.

This morning, I decided to dive into my "In Progress" folder and see if any energy from those drafts would spark something new.  In fact, at first I got diverted into revising a draft that was "nearly there."  I spent some time tweaking the last couple of stanzas of what is now "Ancestral Incantation," but what began as "The Old Ancestral Homestead" (ugh, I cringe at that title).  I blogged about the drafting of this poem here.   Letting it sit for 3-4 weeks seems to have done the trick as I saw how I'd pushed the ending in my first version.  A key turned in a lock in my brain and I saw the door open to how the poem needed to end.  Voila!

After that tinkering and tweaking, I opened my journal and wrote "Too long away again."  This is a repeated phrase that I use just to make the pen move on the page.  It worked again, and it appears I'm still obsessed with creating fairy tales of the Midwest.  (I confess that last night before going to bed I reminded myself that I should go immediately to drafting this morning with no pit stops on blogs or Facebook.  And so I went to sleep thinking about the poems I'd most recently drafted, challenging myself to remember them if I could.  One sign of a good line being its memorability.)

http://www.freefoto.com/preview/33-15-15?ffid=33-15-15

Today, I came up with "Fairy Tale for Girls in Love with Fire."  It begins as the others do with the word "Once," but I changed up the opening this time.  The phrase "who refuses to mind" comes up in this poem, as it does in the others; however, in this new draft, it appears in the closing stanza rather than the first line.  That all happened naturally, and I think it was important to have some time pass between the drafting of these poems so that they don't all start to sound alike. 

I have no idea how many of these fairy tales I have in me, and they make me uneasy, I must confess.  They are so narrative, and that is not my strong suit.  I know it's good to work outside my comfort zone, to bend and stretch, but the hard part is that I have no idea if these are any good at all.  Sigh.  Just when I'd developed some sense of confidence about my more lyric poems. 

As always time and editors will tell, Dear Reader.  Thanks for reading these blog posts in the meantime.