I say this as two parts because well, it is for sure a lot. If you haven’t seen the abundance of links and photos of my poetry collections in previous posts you are sadly missing out. These were 3 collections with 100 poems in each and they really were a labour of love. Something I wanted to do, put my mind to it, and worked hard at achieving!
You can read more about each book here The Darkness, The Light, The Colorful. I won’t bore you with those details because it was already been written. But if you wish to purchase any of the books via paperback or kindle simply click the names above and it will link you to where to buy them! What I will tell you is how I even did it when I am a stay at home mom to 2 boys. One, 2 years old and the other was about 9 months old. Well, it took a LOT of dedication that is for sure.
One of the first things I am sure people are wondering is, how did I find the time? I found the time when my kids were sleeping in the day time, they normally slept for about 2 hours and I would sometimes set goals for myself to be able to write even 5 poems each day or some days a bit more. That way I had goals on how much to write. Now was there some days I wrote 10 and 15 poems? Yes. And they helped a lot when I was feeling unmotivated and skipped a day or two. I also wrote at night when they both were asleep too. I made sure that I never wrote too much because I had done that a few times and found myself burnt out. I would write and write and write and there was periods of times when I wouldn’t write for a week or so because I needed the mental break.
Now, To dip a bit into why I wrote 3 at once. I know wild right? Well, A brief overview of the books if you haven’t checked their individual posts. The darkness is about depression, suicide, drug abuse, hatred and more. This was a very heavy collection to write because I did have some examples of my personal life in there. Though it may be hard to find which though. The light was also a bit hard to write with subjects like overcoming obstacles, strength, perseverance and more. It still was a lighter feel than the first. And then The Colorful which has subjects like music, winning, children, laughter, and everything in between too. When I was writing the 3 together I could flip through different collections based on my moods. I also could flip to change it. Maybe I wrote a bit too much for a few days in The Darkness and my mind would become very dark, I’d flip to the colorful with the light in between to break it up. This was a lot healthier on my head because as I mentioned, some memories were stirred up while writing them that as freeing and amazing as it felt, I still wanted to not have to worry about keeping it dark for a long time.
Another thing I did when I wrote was I got a huge notebook and wrote poems by hand. There just is something about writing poetry by hand that makes it special. Typing things up online can just feel stiff. You can’t really see the poem unless you REALLY space things properly. And a lot of times you find a better word to change out to do you try to it on a computer I feel like the time to do this is so much more than just scratching it out with a pen or a pencil. I also loved using the notebook because I could sit upstairs and I could write different times. I only recently got this laptop I am typing this up on and my bigger personal computer is downstairs. Which sometimes in the middle of the day or even evenings I really have no desire to even want to go downstairs to sit there and type.
Now, how did I keep track of what I wrote? I had the chapters thought out ahead of time. I wrote them out on the first page of the notebook. As I wrote poems and flipped through I would tick off a check beside the chapters as I wrote them. I did this so that I wasn’t always writing in one chapter and had a good range. The goal was to have about 10 poems for each chapter minimum. That was one of the little goals I had. Obviously though as you write and have more inspiration you kind of write how you feel at the time. By doing this there are some chapters with more than others but that is okay though. This was also to help keep track of how many I had written. For some reason I thought I wanted 100 poems for each collection. I liked the number and thought it was good to start.
Was there times I questioned myself? Yup. There was a lot of times when I barely talked about my writing and wanted to quit because I felt like why bother, no one is even going to read them. But I never gave up. I kept going because I wanted these and many more ideas I have to be part of a bigger plan to provide financially for my family while I am still a stay at home mom. It was something that I did when I was a teenager and struggling with friends or even fitting in. I wrote about how I felt and it made me feel better even if they were really dark poems too. It took a lot to finally write some of them down to paper but honestly it was amazing and I couldn’t be happier with the outcome. And after all, The hardest part (So I thought) was to actually write them. WRONG. There was SOO MUCH MORE TO DO that I didn’t even know where to begin, thankfully my moms friend had some help with my questions.
Stacey J. Girard 