A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-Four-Hundred-And-Fifty-Nine

I've been wanting to put together a manuscript for a full length collection of poetry for a while now, and I certainly have the work to do it, but the real issue is in terms of actually crafting a book.  It's important to me that it not just be a bunch of poems thrown together into a single volume but that it work as a cohesive piece.  I know that I was able to accomplish that in Blaze without Burning, so I know that I can do it, but until recently, I have sort of been struggling with how to approach it.  In the past few days, though, I started to get an idea about what I want to center the book around and what I am hoping to be able to write about in it.  There are some pretty big themes swirling in my head at the moment, and I am going to need to write a bunch of new poems that will serve as a sort of center for things, but I believe that much of what I am hoping to explore is already reflected in my poems, it is just that I am now more conscious of cultivating these ideas.  I still need to let things develop, in terms of the actual format of the book, but I have a much clearer idea of it on a big picture level.

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