Week 8: I Write, Therefore I Am
Taylor P -
Hey, friends! Welcome to week eight. This week was mostly productive, though I ran into a few roadblocks with my own productivity…that’s certainly something I am working on! My goal this week was to write a report on the data I collected from my author interviews; however, I ended up not being able to finish it. I got very distracted by binging a great TV show. Yes, I know that’s not a solid excuse, but I am still on track!
To start, I was able to finish my manuscript and send it to my advisor this week. I decided to publish with Amazon KDP simply because it is the cheapest, quickest option for me to get my book published for this project. My advisor is assisting me with formatting and editing, two arenas that I really need help with to make my book look professional. Formatting is my weakest point in this process because I have written all of my books in the exact same format for a decade! With that being said, I hope to learn the basics of book formatting with my advisor’s help.
I finished designing my book cover this week, too, with the help of Sidney from our senior class! She’s a fantastic artist and is skilled in many different formats of art. From digital to oil painting, she has always amazed me (I have a painting she made me hung above my bed and a clay sculpture on my desk!). So, having her help with my book cover has been awesome! I am super grateful she helped me out with that. My art “skills” could never accomplish a professional result. Never. Ever.
Lastly, I wanted to talk about my book title this week to hopefully get you all excited for its release! The title is life & breath, a phrase that has been stuck in my busy brain for many, many years. I did not know I would use that for my poetry book title, but when I scrutinized my collection of poems, I found that many connected this theme of living and breathing to coping with grief. Weird, isn’t it? To me, breath is exactly like grief: it is one of the few vital bodily functions we have both control and no control over. Breathing is necessary to live, and for the majority of the time, we breathe without even thinking about it. Grief is something we all live with, and most of the time, it’s a bearable burden we forget about. However, when we bring consciousness to either grief or breath, we truly feel what our body endures to keep us living.
Now, that probably sounded like a lot of rambling! It makes sense in my head, so hopefully my poetry will showcase that theme of breath being like grief. Next week, I will focus on my data report and finally get it finished. I will continue working on formatting and editing, so stay tuned to learn more about my book!
Until next week, in the wise words of Gandalf the Grey, all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
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