On December 18 of 2013, I published my fourth and fifth poetry books. I don’t really recommend publishing two books on the same day; it’s a little like having your birthday on Christmas. The two books threaten to eclipse each other. It happened that way because I was trying to get them both out before Christmas. and they took paths of differing speeds through the proofing process.

Journeying is my first unillustrated book. I was excited about it because it has four times as many poems as my illustrated books, and it’s thick enough for my name and the title to appear on the spine. It had different proofing issues because the black and white printing process called for a different font for the poems, which I had to test out.

Cuddle Your Curmudgeons is my fourth illustrated book. I had been hoping to find a collaborator to do the artwork — thought I had one lined up, early summer. But when that didn’t work out I was back to considering illustrating it on my own, a prospect that turned out to have substantial procrastinative forces lined up against it. I did thumbnails for the poems that I could, but I was having trouble getting the vision for how I would execute the pictures. The publication of Journeying was, in a way, a very constructive form of procrastination from those illustrations.

I think I got a boost from talking to a new acquaintance, an artist, about possible collaboration on another project. (Funny how far just a little encouragement can go.) I used the added impetus of the month of November, in which many writers engage in National Novel Writing Month (something I’ve done three times) to get busy on the illustrations. And I pretty much got them finished by the end of November. Then there was the process of creating the print-ready pdfs, and the proofing. So the two books ended up gliding to press at the same time.

The other way in which I begin to approach prolific is that I now have over 900 poems on my blog. I expect to roll past the 1000 mark in the next three months or so. Meanwhile, my goal for the year is to do everything I can to increase the audience for my poems. To that end, I’m working on pulling together this website, doing more speaking engagements, and trying to get the word out about my books. Any help towards any of that is greatly appreciated!