the lofty goals of manic me

So I looked it up, and I've written 47 poems this year* (49 now)**. The past two years, I wrote 196 poems each year, so this is a big step down for me. I could just accept the fact that this just wasn't a poetry year, but I like being defined as a poet, and the competitive part of me can't accept that. If anyone actually read this blog regularly (or at all), they may remember my poetry goal a few months ago, which was to write 2 poems a day for the rest of the year. I'm not good at long term goals. I'm a sprinter, not a marathoner, which is why I can do NaNo, but not WriYe.


So, silly foolish me mentioned this to Rowan, who quipped up "if you write 50 poems a day for the next 3 days, you'll meet your goal!". And my inner manic me went "challenge accepted!", much like Barney in How I Met Your Mother. Sigh.

We did the math. It's actually closer to 37 poems a day for the next 4 days. I figure if I go into this challenge knowing I won't make it, but just hoping for a boost before the end of the year, I can actually get a large number of poems written, even if I can't write the 149 (now 147)** that I need. My manic me got all excited, so I found a shiny new composition notebook***, wrote page numbers on the first 149 pages (OCD me whining all the while about 'what if you write a long poem that takes up more than one page and screw it all up?'), and then wrote what day I should be at on the appropriate pages.

I don't know why I'm posting this. It's a long understood fact that if I talk too much about something rather than just diving in headfirst, it doesn't happen. But it's also a well known fact that I regularly make these crazy goals and don't meet them, so maybe this is reality me trying to make manic me come to terms with that. Yeah. Like that will happen. :)


*that's 47 posted on Allpoetry. I know I wrote more I didn't post, and I have about 8 half-written as drafts on Allpoetry, but I didn't count those the past two years, so I won't count them now. Not to say I'll post everything I write in this goal either, but at least I'll have my precious numbers and statistics. :)

**I wrote two poems since making this lofty goal, but I'm using them as a sort of buffer rather than counting them in 'poems I wrote today', since I started them before deciding to do this. Plus, they aren't in my shiny red notebook***.

***It isn't actually shiny.


update: as anticipated, that didn't happen. But at least I wrote more than I otherwise would have. And now I have a whole new year to write more poems. :)

--
Listening to: My Immortal (piano only) by Evanescence. Songs like this really make me wish I could play a musical instrument. It just sounds so delicate, and yet so powerful. I love the piano. I also have a bunch of string quartet versions of songs, and they do the same thing for me.