Our Part of the Night, the preamble

As September settled in, I was a little fried from the click it up a notch photo project. I'm not altogether sure why the photo project kicked my ass as much as it did. I mean, What? I have been snapping pictures for as long as I can remember, and the two former photo projects this year worked out very well. I blamed it on the camera, sure, but there had to be something else at play too. I think the real issue with the camera and the process may have had something to do with having to be at my computer for so much of the time. I'm always at the computer and that has gotten tiresome.

I was thinking about all the hours, all the years I've been doing creative things and I have to admit, the computer has become a more recent thing. The other issue with the computer is that even though I'm sitting at it, I'm not always working.

I was chatting about this with an old friend. I was telling her that I've been watching tons of shows. “What?” she said. “You never do that!” And she was right, at least I never used to do that. It gave me a lot to think about. I've noticed that late at night, after the family has gone to bed, if I'm up writing in my notebook, or drawing, or reading, I have a very specific wind down and I get to bed early and I sleep great. When I'm up late at night looking at Netflix or YouTube, I'm tired, but not sleepy, I stay up later and I sleep like shit.

Then, as I was thinking about the September project, a poetry project, I thought I might do something much more lofi. Something more like what I used to do. I like to write poetry, even if it's very bad poetry. I suddenly realized that I don't need to have a computer to do that. Hell, I don't even need electricity.

There was one concern as I began to formulate the project in my mind. I generally write a bunch of poetry after I have read a bunch of poetry. I think there are more people out there writing poetry than there are people reading poetry. And up until the onset of this project I was not one of them. I have, when writing poetry in the past, written one poem for every fifty I read. But this year, I haven't read any, or very little anyway. Was I really going to turn into one of those?

Sure. Why not. All I wanted to achieve from this project was a little break from my computer. I had been taking a bit of a break since Camp NaNoWriMo in July. I had gone back to my trusty composition notebook and a box full of cheap ballpoint pens left over from my service industry days.

So, that's that, I'm writing the poems in my notebook. What the next step was going to be, I hadn't yet decided when I started writing. The challenge? To do my annual poetry project which culminates in a chapbook of poems.