The Crafty Poet: Unveiling the Cover

My book, The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop, is moving right along. The galleys have been proofed and returned. Page numbers have been added to the Contents. And the cover has been designed.

In spite of having proofread the manuscript countless times before sending it off to my publisher months ago, I found some errors that I'd overlooked back then. Now I wonder how the heck did I miss that? and that? With this recent reading, each time I went through the manuscript I found a few more things I'd missed. Mostly small stuff like an extra space, but I want the book to be as close to right as I can make it. (I'm avoiding saying "perfect.")

Organizing this book was a huge challenge as it contains work from more than two years, work from this blog and from my Poetry Newsletter, work written by me and work written by other poets. In the Newsletter it doesn't matter if the poem and prompt coordinate with the Craft Tip, but for the book I needed to logically organize the material. I made a list of everything I planned to use in the book. Then I stared at that list for days/weeks until a plan began to form. That plan, of course, changed through multiple drafts, but once I had a plan, I knew I was going to get the job done.

Because the book includes writing contributed by other poets, the big challenge in editing/polishing was to achieve consistency of style throughout the text. Some writers, for example, put commas around "too" when it means "also." Other writers do not. Some writers use the period key to create an ellipsis. Others use Option plus the semi-colon key. Either is correct but the look is slightly different. I wanted all the ellipses to look the same. (I have come to hate the ellipsis.) Stuff like that was sort of crazy-making, but I'm still here. And I'm thrilled with the book and can't wait to have it here. That should happen this summer.

In the meantime, here's an advance view of the cover. I'm very happy with this. It feels just right for a craft book.