Deadline Mania

I sent off a collection of poems to a competition last week, after two weeks of obsessive staring at 14 poems and beating them into shape, up until 1 a.m. every night. This obsessive and compulsive behaviour has taken its toll - I am now twitching and wishing I still had the manuscript in front of me so I could keep correcting it. But the deadline has passed.

Without the need to send the poems off, I would probably not have been quite so likely to stay up until the wee small hours every night, microwaving the candle and considering, in minute detail, perfect enjambment, rhythm, meaning, the flow of the sequence of poems, whether it was ridiculous of me to even be writing poems, how a semi colon should be placed in a poem, if a semi colon should be placed in a poem and whether or not I was going to manage to get any paid work done. In fact, I would most likely have edited the collection down to one poem of about three syllables

.I cooked in a daze, barely tasting the food, and thrived mostly on coffee. I was monosyllabic in conversation, shambling of aspect and would have been no use to anyone if I'd had any longer to work on the collection.So thank god for deadlines!

Now to find myself another one. I miss the whole process.