Getting Back to the Book
An update on progress
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about my progress on “Earworms and Emotions”, the book of poetry I’m planning (hoping) to publish in early 2026. So here’s a bit of an update on progress, mood, distractions, and everything in-between.
I think it’s fair to say that I’ve not made very good progress on the book. I was hoping to have 30 poems completed by now, and I only have 24. And whilst I have a lot of ideas in my reMarkable, none of them have particularly sparked my creative interest of late.
But all is not lost; I am not giving up, but I do need to consider my next steps. Thinking strategically about it, I have a couple of options:
Re-prioritise everything I do, and want to do, so that I have more time to spend writing for the book.
Re-consider whether I should be looking at a later publication date, to give me more time.
So what have I been doing, rather than writing poems?
Well, mostly I’ve been blogging here on The Ode Map. The last couple of months have been really creative for me, but in relation to writing about writing - I’ve written 9 Ode Map posts in the last month, when I was only planning on writing 2-4. Maybe I should have held some back(?), but what’s the point in that. Anyway, I was having the inspiration for the posts and, frankly, it’s easier for me to just lean into it and get them done and dusted than to make a note somewhere to come back to later; it would just keep niggling away at me.
The other (creative) thing that’s kept me away from writing new poetry, is that I’ve been revisiting my old poetry. In particular, I’m planning to re-issue a slim volume of my early works.
This will not just be a reissue, though. It will be the poems, alongside commentary, how I felt at the time, and how I feel now about them (nearly 30 years later). It’ll be more of a personal reflection, punctuated by poems, I guess. There’ll be more about this in a later post - stay tuned.
And, of course, work keeps getting in the way of having all this fun. As a reminder, I do this creative writing and The Ode Map as a hobby, rather than as my ‘day job’.
Most recently, I’ve written several professional articles (about fractional leadership, and agile strategy delivery, amongst other things), and I’ve been working on a talk that I’ll be giving towards the end of October.
Back to those two options, then.
I have decided that I’m not going to try and re-prioritise the rest of my activities so that I have more time for creative writing. For one reason - I don’t think it’ll work. I find that I work best when I’m doing what I’m in the mood for. In my professional life, this is great because, as a fractional worker with multiple clients I can pretty much work on the thing that I feel like doing at the time.
And ‘doing what I’m in the mood for’, creatively, is why I’m in this situation. I didn’t write as many poems as I wanted, but I created lots of other useful, informative posts for The Ode Map. So I’m going to keep on doing what I’m doing and, who knows? Maybe the mood dial will swing back towards poetry and away from writing about writing.
In a couple of months time, I will take stock again and see if more drastic action is required.
As always, thank you for reading.
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