This year I had hoped to participate in Poem A Day (PAD) challenges in April (for National Poetry Month) and November (for National Novel Writing Month). I successfully completed April's 30+ poems in a month without too much difficulty, but November is an evil month with a full schedule of Comp classes, so I only wrote half of the required poems. Other new poetry this year was pretty sparse too, with only about 5 new poems being written outside of those two months.
My other main challenge for the year was to revise a poem each week since I had a giant stack of rough poems from my write every day challenge in 2014. I failed at this one too--only working on a handful of them. I still haven't even gone through and reread the massive quantity that I produced that year.
1 out of 3 challenges was met. So back to the drawing board.
I will once again do the April and November PADs. However, if I think it will be really hard to complete the PAD in November, I can plan ahead and write 30 poems during the rest of the year and I'll count this one as a success--so write at least 60 new poems in 2016.
I'd also like to post here more frequently. I think a goal of at least once a month seems doable.
My other challenge goal will be to finish going through my unrevised poems from 2014 and now 2015 and make a plan for revision. I'm not sure I can set a number here, but I hope to get more in the completed pile than last year (which was pretty much none--I did revise a few poems, but I didn't finish any).
I think the reason why 2014 was a success was because I set aside time every day to write. I'd do that again, but by the end of the year, I was burnt out (which could be why this year's production was so much less). I need to figure out a balance between forcing myself to write every day and not writing hardly at all. I'm still not sure what that balance is, but here's to figuring it out.
Happy New Year and here's to writing more in 2016!
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