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The empty Book  Photo credit: Kazi Hirok Al-Arafat (Bidrohi)  

And so I come to the end of the first month of my “Resolution 2012” project. The result? Just a tad over 11,000 words written—no great shakes, really, but not bad for a start. I had a few “placeholder” days, where I didn’t really write much of anything, though surprisingly, when I look back among even the placeholder days, only one of them was truly a I don’t have time to write anything today kind of entry, and there were only five days that I wrote fewer than 200 words.

But more importantly and surprisingly (to me, at any rate), I actually wrote two poems in the month. Neither of them are ready for primetime, but frankly, I can’t remember the last time I had two ideas for poems in a month. When I first started taking poetry seriously, I was writing 20–25 poems a year, but I haven’t written more than half a dozen annually in quite some time. So two in a month is astoundingly prolific for me. 

Then of course I wrote a number blog posts. With five posts here at Far From the Madding Crowd (including this one), I have surpassed my production for all of 2010 and equalled the total for last year. I also wrote three posts over at Singing the Apple, which equalled my production in 2009, the last year I posted anything at all on that blog. So, eight blog posts for the month. I’m quite pleased with that, even if not all of it was riveting stuff.

And finally, a pipe dream: I sketched out the framework for a historical novel. This actually took up quite a lot of my writing time, as it entailed a fair bit of research. I have no idea where this will lead. I may end up getting bored with it and abandon the whole thing. My problem is that while I have come up with what I think is a pretty neat background and overall structure, I have no idea what sort of story to write. I think you’ll agree that this is a serious problem for a prospective novelist. So my intention is to just keep on digging into the history of the period and see what comes up. I’ve created a few fictional characters to go along with the historical figures, but I need something for them to do. History is fine, but there needs to be some other intrigue to keep the reader interested. This is where my imagination has failed me thus far, but my hope is that, like with the poetry, if I keep whittling away at the novel the muse will whisper something in my ear.

As I’ve been telling myself all month, only time will tell. But if this month is anything to go by, there’s reason to be hopeful.