Chapbooks on the Brain

Earlier this month at the World Fantasy Convention, I saw the most FANTASTIC panel about speculative poetry. And while I must say I’ve never fallen OUT of love with it, I FELL IN LOVE A LITTLE HARDER after that panel, and all I wanted to do was write a chapbook.

For weeks I wandered the house, thinking WHAT IS MY CHAPBOOK IDEA?

And then I realized that a long-form narrative poem I’d roughly drafted out is actually kind of an outline-in-verse for a great, long-form narrative-poem-in-poems chapbook idea that I think I might be calling The (Future Former) King of Elfland’s Printing Press.

But that might take a while to get up to submission-speed. And of course, Patty and Carlos and I are working on our Lamp! collaboration, which will be another chapbook-length shared-world poetry collection.

And that’s fine. You know, things take time and all that.

But I wanted to ALREADY HAVE WRITTEN A CHAPBOOK RIGHT NOW.

And then I got the idea!

I’ve had this website/blog since 2014. I’d been missing LiveJournal for while at that point, and I had a lot of projects I was really into, and I wanted to be blogging about all and sundry, so I got Julia Rios and Amal El-Mohtar to advise me. And here we are.

It’s not fancy and never has been, but it is so much better than that feeling of missing blogging, and it uploads nicely to my Goodreads and my Amazon Author pages which I normally don’t have very much to do with, other than occasional housekeeping. (I should probably do more.)

But I have, over the years, written many an occasional poem here. And I thought about a chapbook I might call The Day I Superglued the Moon (and other poems). And I could divide them up into these sections:

Celestial
Terrestrial
Pestilential
Sororal
Romantical
Fantastic
Ekphrastic
Infernal

Of course, by the time I got through sorting them all out, it’s probably longer than a chapbook. More of a collection. And who’s to say who’s publishing such things these days, but it can’t hurt to have a go at further curating the manuscript and seeing what comes of it!

Submissions AHOY!