1. Take a look at your drafting process from day one to the end.  How did you go from one to the next?  What guided you?  What challenges did you encounter?

Out of the seven days I drafted this poem I found the fourth day to be the most difficult. Day one was easy for me as I immediately knew what I wanted to write about when this project was introduced to the class. I sat down and was able to simply throw my idea onto paper, then call my work done for the day. The following days I edited small changes such as moving sentences around, combining stanzas, and expanding on my original idea. However, as the week continued I found myself hating the current progress of this piece. I was unsure of what exactly to change as I had already worked through quite a bit of structural and language edits. By day four I felt stuck, I began working slowly through each stanza analyzing every word and the weight it held. I quickly began to find small changes in vocabulary which enhanced my imagery and helped further improve my writing. By the final day of the project I had worked through enough revisions to be happy with my first draft.

1. What lead you to decorate the book the way you did?  How did the content influence your creation in another genre?  What are your hopes for the synergy. 

I chose to decorate my book the way I did to further capture my message. I captioned the book “Hide” as it is about me hiding from my feelings. I quickly wrote the title in a white colored pencil to make it look rushed and ominous. This added a layer of stress which correlates to the stress I try to convey in my poem. The rose petal after the title is to show love which is one of the themes of the poem. The beetle represents my other theme of manipulation and hate. I felt adding a “dirty” bug would exemplify the struggles in the poem. The beetle is also positioned in front of a maze. As if the gross bug must navigate the maze in order to find the prize in the center. In my case, the prize in the center is love and the maze is life. There is a small heart in the middle of the maze to help further demonstrate this.

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