What am I working on these days?

A friend of mine reminded me that, on my old site, I had a little box that listed projects I was currently working on, and asked if those had changed at all. Yes and no. I'm always working on multiple projects - some rise to the fore, some fall to the back. Some get completed, some get dropped, some never get out of the state of being worked on. Here are the ones that are receiving top attention lately:

1) Zues and the Giant Iced Tea: A new collection of Poetry, tentatively titled, for a local press. They've only asked me to submit something, so no promise of publication at this point, but I'm 97% done the manuscript and I'm pretty damned excited about it. It's a collection of narrative poems (ie, poems that tell a story, either individually or collectively) and, in a lot of ways, is a more mature collection than Poetaster

2) Newborn - my graphic novel. I haven't been able to work on this in almost 2 years, due to the craziness of my life. But in the last few months I've managed to get back on the wagon and am having a blast with it. I'm about 22 pages in right now...will probably be a couple hundred pages long at least. It's slow going, due to my work life, but I'm hoping to start revealings parts of it here as I proceed. Keep posted!

3) The Last Days of Naomichi Onada: I'm hoping to have time to finish my first final draft of The Last Days of Naomichi Onada, a full length narrative poem about a Japanese soldier stuck on an island in the Atlantic, who still thinks WW2 is going on, based on a poem I included in Poetaster, The Lost Orders of Onoda Hirou, based on a real story. For quite some time this has been my anticipated 'next publication', but invitations to put together poetry collections for publication keep trumping it. An embarrassment of riches, really, but this project edges closer to completion.

4) Other stuff. Other high priority projects that I'd like to, but aren't necessarily being worked on right now include another couple collections of poetry, a full length novel, and my father's novel, which is quite good, but just needs to be put into a final draft.

So...that's what's going on right now*.

*valid until September 2, 2009