How I’m juggling a building my bespoke poetry business with other creative projects.
I don’t function well without a plan. Whilst I long to be one of those spontaneous “I just wing it” people, my multi tabbed mind would explode if I tried to keep track of everything without writing it down. I have a planner which I love, and April seems a perfect time to reset and plan for the next few months.
In all honesty, I’ve had an odd start to the year. Some things have been going very well (hello wedding poetry!) and other things not so well. Launching a new business takes a fair bit of time and effort. I’m doing this on my own and whilst I’m super confident in my ability to write bespoke poems it’s taken time to truly understand other aspects of running a small business. There have been a few hiccups, and a lot of highlights and I’m at a point where I feel Kathryn Anna Writes Bespoke will work! I’m so thrilled – it really is brilliant to have a way to work doing what I love.
New creative projects
As well as my work writing for other people, I have two new projects buzzing around my mind. It’s hard to carve out time for my creative work, but the changes I made at the start of the year has had a positive impact and I’m starting to get back into my writing groove, with regular publications on Substack as well as tentative steps towards my new books.
What I’ve realised I need to do is pick one of these new projects as my focus. Having picked, I’ve tried to gather a more solid idea of my goal. My goal is big, possibly pie in the sky, but hey, who doesn’t love pie? If I aim high I might hit, and if I miss, the work I’ve done will be useful in other ways. I’ve gone through my notebooks from the last eighteen months and marked those poems I feel “have legs”. The next stage is to type up, which is my first redraft, then continue to work and tweak until I’m sure I’ve got the poem where it wants to be.
I have few poems from the last year or so. There may be more buried in my journal but these are likely to be around topics I’m not ready to tackle just yet. We’ll see what the next month brings. I love and hate this stage of planning a new book – it’s exciting because I can feel the power that’s lying beneath the poems, but it’s also frustrating because I need to exercise so much patience with both myself and the work.
I’ve honed the number of courses and online groups I‘m part of too. I joined too many at the start of the year, forgot how terrible I am with lots of different groups of people and ended up not interacting with anyone. Fingers crossed this new focus will give me the community and collaboration that is so beneficial to my work.
So, April is reset, seeds are beginning to emerge – lets see what blooms.
Until next time
Kathryn
xx