Forgive me internet, for I have sinned. It's been 6 months since my last blog post.

Inspired by watching 'Julie & Julia' on tele tonight, I am thinking maybe I'll make a record of my attempt to publish my poetry collection. I missed the December deadline, of course, else why would I need to such a prompt? I could excuse myself by claiming it's because I had to pick up production of the NZPS anthology after the poor editor had a seemingly endless series of obstacles, but to be fair I didn't have to do that until October. I was well past the point of no return in my lack of application to the collection by then. No, all I can do is sigh and quote from the January 1st page of my Forbes Success Calendar (now several years old, and being scrolled through again as I hate to waste a good thing): "The gist of New Year's day is: try again." (Attributed to Frank Crane, though I saw it somewhere else recently, with a different credit - can't remember who.)

Anyway, I'm up to Day 1008 of my weight loss programme, which, though slowing down as I near my goal weight, has been remarkably successful and aided significantly by my conscientiously recording the details every day, so surely the same principle should work for publishing. Today I sent out a submission of 3 poems to Shot Glass Journal. They are all poems that will be in the collection, so I thought I'd give them a go before they are published and go out of circulation.

So, where am I up to? The first draft has been gone through quite thoroughly by the wonderfully kind Kerry Popplewell. She was one of my English lecturers at Vic a zillion years ago and when I asked her to cast her experienced eye over the ms. she replied that it was like asking Walt Whitman to comment on Emily Dickinson. In any event, she generously made annotations on the poems and offered many suggestions for improving them. I've followed many of her suggestions, and I'm grateful that some of the poems have ended up much tighter as a result. The ones she wanted change in that I couldn't see a way round, I've dropped altogether, so it's a bit shorter as well.

I have almost finished the preparation stage (ie ripping, glueing and gesso'ing) for 7 altered books in which I will hand-write and illustrate the collection. Most of the gesso job took place during the Rugby World Cup, as I watched every game and was sitting around a lot.

I've printed out the poems and arranged the pages in the first book, which now has a title page, publishing details and the Contents. The printed out pages were just to see how they fitted in the available space in the book, and to show me where I needed to do fancy tricks like adding pages and inserting boxes and that sort of thing.

I have an ISBN number, which is actually surprisingly exciting, and a definite push to get a move on. When you apply for your number the form asks you for a projected publishing date, and I put March, so that's another little incentive.

I've registered at PrintStop, which has a fantastic self-publishing system of templates and limited run printing at ridiculously reasonable cost, so I can get the printed copies done at any time. What's holding me up is my total inability to work out how to design a cover. The template required is in InDesign, my arch-nemesis. I'm going to need help.

So that's where I'm up to. If I want to post a little something each night before bedtime, I'm going to have to do a little bit on the books each day, aren't I. Baby steps; I'm good at those.