Writing is its own reward. Once you've done it for a long time, you stop getting excited every time you see your name in print. But every now and then, something happens. And you get excited.
Mid-afternoon is a stop point for me, because I have to pick up my younger daughter from school. Just before leaving one day last week, I decided to get the mail first. There was a postal notice in my box. It said that a priority mail package was behind my front door. When I picked it up, I tore into the package.
The package was from my publisher, GreatUNpublished.com. Inside that package was the manifestation of a 43 year old dream, a copy of my first book by just me.
I'd seen my work in anthologies, and done a chapbook. I'd edited an anthology of poetry and prose by others, and the only thing I'd written was the introduction for it. Right now, that anthology is waiting to be published by WritersClub Press, who donated printing costs for our poetry month celebration at suite101.com. Preparing that manuscript had given me confidence, and insight into compiling a book as well.
The publisher had done an excellent job with the cover of my own book. Jan Allinder, wildlife photographer and webmaster at Lucid Images Wildlife Photography, worked with me. The photograph of waterbirds standing in rippled water set off the cover perfectly. A large segment of my writing involves natural history and a number of the poems in section II of my book have references to different species. At first glance, I knew that, at the very least, it was an attractive book.
I had worked around the clock to finish the book by a self-imposed deadline. The book was basically written, because I had files and files of essays on poetry, some published, some not. In addition, I had about forty poems that I'd worked on for the last year and a half, and I was pretty comfortable with the state they were in. I collected all the material from paper files, and began to pull the manuscript together on a disk. I had material on three different computers, so that was one of the most time-consuming aspects of the book. Once I had compiled the manuscript, I began to retool and whittle. A big bonus for me was finishing a poem I'd actually published. I never really liked the ending until I took a hard look at the poem as I was editing my manuscript.
Poets have flashes of insight, and that's what enabled me to finally finish
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