Blood, sweat and poetry

I was up last night at 2 a.m. writing poetry. The words don’t always come to me, but when they do, I have to write them down. I woke up around 8 a.m. and looked at what I wrote. It’s a good thing I captured the words last night because I don’t even remember having those thoughts.

I’m deep in the process of finishing my second book of poetry. I have 23 out of the 30 poems finished and edited. I completed my first book in March and I somehow forgot how challenging the process can be. From writing to editing to cover design to marketing, I do it all myself.

Here’s some of the many steps of the process.

• Decide to write a book
• Write poems
• Decide I don’t like poems or they don’t fit the theme, then write more poems
• Begin to edit poems
• Write even more poems, even though some won’t make it into the book
• Continue to edit poems
• Write more poems because ideas are still flowing
• Decide to stop to the cycle of constantly writing and finish editing
• Decide which of the finished poems should go in the book and pick the order they should go in
• Select corresponding images for poem – All the photos in the book are mine and I have to go through thousands of images to find the perfect one
• Upload poems and images into Kindle Create. Do this several times due to formating issues that can’t be fixed in the software
• Finally publish book, then collapse for a while
• Tell family I actually wrote a book
• Announce book on blog and social media
• Ask people to buy or review book and repeat this several times
• Decide it’s time to start this crazy cycle all over again.

© 2021  Dimples and Grins.  All rights reserved.

Question: Who wants to share their writing / publishing process with world? Your work should be known and appreciated because it is not easy.

If you want to acknowledge my hard work, you can purchase my first book. The second one (Asleep and Dreaming) will be up for sale soon (probably within the next week).