spaced out

i just finished revising, for what feels like, the zillionth time, a manuscript i thought i would never revise. though saying that, i knew it needed more work when i left my master's program manuscript in hand. that manuscript has fallen away and what remains is stronger, cleaner, and captures what i do. i will spend the next calendar year sending out this work for traditional publication. when that happens, i will rejoice. if it do not, i shall selfpublish it and move on to the next manuscript. publication has never been a big issue with me. traditional or not, it will be published by next year. amen.

the issues i finally resolved with this latest draft were my spacing issues. going through each space, poem by poem, and formatting them so they reflect the way i read the poems aloud. this took me every bit of three hours, possibly four this morning. it is a time consuming process. i'm glad it's done.

i had to deal with my use of Mdashes too, i found them to be redundant functions of the spaces, but i only realized that after the hours of dealing with spaces, so i have eliminated those too. of the punctuation that remains in my manuscript, only colons, an explanation mark, and apostrophes remain. save epigraphs, true punctuation is preserved as used by others.

it had been a long time i'd wanted to extract punctuation from my works. i have begun that process here, but there, there it is complete. now, we'll see how it plays out.

i look forward to the next manuscript, the next book, the major projects lining up on my horizon. this one has been years in the making and i'm ready for the next venture.