I Held Aloft My Magic Sword and Said

Today I distilled my manuscript back down to a chapbook: commit, merge, push --force.

Everything I’ve learned about structuring meaning across a full-length collection made this version cleaner, sharper, more deliberate.

The path was nonlinear:

1. Finish a chapbook
   
2. Submit it widely
   
3. Start the full manuscript
   
4. Realize halfway through the chapbook no longer holds up
   
5. Withdraw it from consideration
   
6. Focus fully on the manuscript
   
7. Burn out
   
8. Create a chapbook, this time with precision
   
9. Submit both
   
   It’s not that the original chapbook was weak. Most of its poems survived. What changed was the architecture: order, style, and an understanding of how to modulate pressure across a sequence.