I also had a daily writing practice in 2020, something I decided to do well before the pandemic. I just finished, three days ago, going through that material--it was a lot; I only missed two or weeks worth of days--deciding what to discard and what to revise into a working first draft. In revising, I set myself some constraints. First, I worked on the poems in strict, monthly chronological order. In other words, I did not start on May 2020 until I finished with April. I did, though, sometimes skip around within a month in order to make a poem. So whatever I wrote on April 5th might be combined with what I wrote on April 17th--and sometimes one poem comes from three or even four of my daily entries. Second, if the revision process made it clear that I needed more content, I allowed myself to go as far back into the past as I wanted, but not into the future. This way I did not introduce into the poem something that did not happen until after the original piece was written. The next step, though I am going to wait a little bit since I have other projects to work on, will be to see which of these first working drafts I can move on to the next stage. Who knows? Maybe this will turn out to be my next book.
I also had a daily writing practice in 2020, something I decided to do well before the pandemic. I just finished, three days ago, going through that material--it was a lot; I only missed two or weeks worth of days--deciding what to discard and what to revise into a working first draft. In revising, I set myself some constraints. First, I worked on the poems in strict, monthly chronological order. In other words, I did not start on May 2020 until I finished with April. I did, though, sometimes skip around within a month in order to make a poem. So whatever I wrote on April 5th might be combined with what I wrote on April 17th--and sometimes one poem comes from three or even four of my daily entries. Second, if the revision process made it clear that I needed more content, I allowed myself to go as far back into the past as I wanted, but not into the future. This way I did not introduce into the poem something that did not happen until after the original piece was written. The next step, though I am going to wait a little bit since I have other projects to work on, will be to see which of these first working drafts I can move on to the next stage. Who knows? Maybe this will turn out to be my next book.