Despite having turned down the opportunity to do it ten days ago, I found myself thinking about NaPoWriMo all morning.

I am now resorting to the pros and cons list.

Pros

• I have produced only three new poems since January, and two of them were stinkers.  One was so bad I could not show it to anyone in draft form.
• My grad school advisor has challenged me to write three new poems for my next packet, which I will send in April 2.
• Emma wanted to revive our awesome, secret NaPo blog, which was great fun to work on because we had awesome characters.
• Clearly the exercise works– almost half of my graduate thesis will be poems that were first drafted in a poem-a-day grind.
• Our October grind group has grown and grown, and though people come and go in 29-to-31-day increments, I expect that April will have a healthy number of poem-a-day-ers.

Cons

• I’ve struggled to keep up with commitments the last couple months, and with various trips to doctors and some sick days, I’ve been having what I would consider my roughest semester thus far in grad school.
• Ladybug hates it when I could be spending time with her and I’m obsessing over a deadline for a poem that I know won’t be very good anyhow.
• I can’t get too focused on new work while I have so much revision to be done for my thesis.  And the poems which need the most revision are ones that came from the October and November grinds.