Good News

I'm happy to report that my publisher has accepted my third full-length poetry collection, Temptation by Water. The book is scheduled for release next summer, 2010. Needless to say, I'm delighted. These are the poems that I've been working on for the past three years.

The process for this collection was a bit different from that for the first two books. With those two, I just wrote poems. Then when I had 50-60 that I thought were book-worthy, I gathered them together and read and reread them, looking for common threads, looking for a single unifying concept. Once I had the backbone for the collection, I selected the poems that I thought fit and moved on to finding a structural plan.

With this new collection, I had my main idea fairly early on. I wonder if that signals some kind of development? It did, I think, result in fewer false starts and fewer poems that, while I might have liked them, just wouldn't fit into the collection thematically. The negative to this approach is that I'm now confronted with a pretty barren folder.

I'll be using the same cover artist. I love his work. I just sent him a handful of representative poems and a few thoughts about what I have in mind. But I trust his creativity. I've done my job; now I'll let him do his.

Details will follow as they develop.

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