I completed NaNoWriMo. I spent a Month at the Met. I am well on my way to reading 200 books this year. Not everyone gravitates towards challenges, but I have always found that I have benefited from them greatly.

When I was still just a hobbyist poet, I challenged myself to write 31 poems each month, for 3 months in a row. That is how I stopped being a hobbyist. Before that I believed in the muse and luck, if a poem came to me once a month, that was enough. That is not how any writing works, having already worked on novels, seriously, for over five years, I should have known that. But people often talk about poetry in a way that makes writing it seem different then writing prose. After writing 31 poems a month, for 3 months, I knew that it wasn’t about the muse, but a lot of hard work.

When I created the project, a Month at the Met, I didn’t know how it would go. I knew I would visit the Met once a day, every day, for a month, to write. I also knew that daily I would have to put a poem that I had just written, at the Met, up on the web. I wrote some bad poems during that month, but overall it was one of the most productive times in my life in terms of writing. Over half of the poems I did as part of the project, ended up being published within a year. I was so energized by that month, that I wrote a novel in verse, the following month.

I have been writing a lot lately. Working on old poems and writing new ones. However I want to be energized and challenged in a new way. That’s why I came up with idea of a Poetry Marathon, a 24 hour poem writing challenge, where every hour you have to write and post a new poem. Initially I was just going to do it, but then I started talking about it with Jacob, and he wanted to do it as well. We are planning to do it in early August. I expect it to be a very small marathon, but an extremely productive one.

I am still working out the details, but if you are interested in participating or following the Marathon, you should sign up for the mailing list here: Poetry Marathon.