Burrowing my nose into cyber-soil

Second draft begun today. The book is divided into eight sections. I combed through the first section today and managed to contract it from 65 poems to 53. It's a start. I feel pleased I did SOMETHING, but quite morose about the prospect of the massive volume of work still ahead. More than 400 poems AAAAARRRGH!

HAVE to stay healthy, drink less wine.

Decided to scrap the interweaving prose: good decision. It felt good just chucking the lot. Let the poems speak completely for themselves, they must tell the STORY of the first meeting, the love exchanges, the first illness, the move ... all the way to the CRISIS. ALL the poems that don't serve the flow of the story must go. Can't be sentimental, this isn't about me or my supposed voice, it's about ... About what exactly?

I thought it should be all Memento Mori centred, but the truth is there was so much healing. Necessary healing, inevitable healing. The sheer effort of healing. Healing taking itself upon itself. So how is this going to help people? DH Lawrence: Ship of Death. Must read that again.

Because there was so much that was so depressing, so difficult. Do people want to know about that? I suppose they might do ...

The question of the Butterfly poems. How readable are they? Should I just scrap the lot? They tell so much story. Can't make all the decisions in one go. Would people actually read the Butterflies?

This is a blog. Is it ok to use it as a kind of journal for jotting down stuff about my stuff? Not sure about that either. Maybe this is a mistake. What do I have to lose? Nothing. Nothing!

The whole of my life is one big experiment. Or maybe not so big. Maybe very small. That would feel more comfortable.

Maybe somebody is going to comment. Maybe not. Either way, THIS is an experiment. A kind of burrowing my nose into cyber-soil and taking a good whiff.