IRENE CUNNINGHAM
-Writer-
Years ago, other writers would say to me, 'You need to focus on just one thing,' and I wondered how their imagination couldn't allow itself to wander around, like mine. It seems they were straight novelists, writing one at a time then wrapping themselves in turmoil for months - sometimes years with all the waiting and rejections of just one piece of work. I still don't have a name for what I am. Sometimes I'm a poet with a novel building in the background, and a few times a year I'm a writer leaping from one WIP to another and often jumping onto an obsessive new project. Right now, I'm both together and chucking poetry and prose out the door to meet deadlines. But at least I'm at it.
​
The newest WIP is a novella, I think, written in a series of short stories set around the same incident and told from different points of view, with completely other life stories. I'm perhaps a quarter of the way through the first solid draft...hoping to get it down before the end of the year. It only began at the end of August, but my history with new projects and obsessions is a battle I must charge through.
​
There are probably about six other novels that get a sweeping week of my attention once a year so I'm hoping that this one doesn't join them. My plan is to gradually move these projects along so that when the (creepy) government allow me to retire in a few years I will have a decent pile of work to serve up, one after another, or simultaneously, to set me up on my long expected path.
​