Sometimes you just need to finish things.

During a 100-day project on a world cruise, I wrote a 10-line poem each day — small daily acts of observation, memory, weather, and whim. I used two notebooks: one to scribble down each poem, the other to transcribe the same poem in my best handwriting, as a kind of ritual, or record.

I recently opened the second book and realised, to my dismay, it stopped at Day 57. For some reason, I’d never caught up. So I did what needed doing. Using Speechnotes, a speech-to-text app, I dictated the missing poems from the original notebook and pasted them in. Where that didn’t work, I simply cut out the handwritten pages and glued them down. Now, finally, I have a complete physical record of the process: 102 days’ worth of daily poems. One phase finished. And I could move on.

Returning Home: The Shift Toward Revision

Reading back over the poems surprised me. A few had a shape, an insight, a flicker of unexpected imagery. It turned out that doing something every day, even quickly, had taught me something. So I decided to revise all the poems — in order — from Day 1 to Day 100. I hoped this would give the whole collection a more consistent voice.

I didn’t revise once. I went through them again. And again. And again — until each poem felt finished, or at least alive in its own right. This process took about 15 months.

Some poems were sent out during the process and published (in slightly earlier forms) in Wildfire Words, The Lake, Morphrog, Fig Tree, Stray Words, The High Window, Poetry & All That Jazz, The Pomegranate (London), Seventh Quarry, and Black Nore Review. These small acceptances gave me encouragement — but also made me keep working, keep returning, keep refining.

What I Learned in the Process

The revision work was repetitive but revealing. I kept catching myself doing the same things wrong:

Starting too early, and ending far too late.

Leaving in lines that were clever but unnecessary.

Getting overly emotional without clarity.

Forgetting to say what I really wanted to say.

And quite often, not sounding quite like myself.

Some drafts were just awful — others were rewrites of earlier pieces. Still, the process of revision was where the real poems emerged. “First thought best thought” is a myth. As Ernest Hemingway said: “The only kind of writing is rewriting.”

What Comes Next
Now I have 100 finished poems. Not just daily jottings, but poems that feel like they belong together — as part of a single body of work. The next step is shaping these into a book. I’ve been thinking about structure, tone, voice, and how the poems echo each other. There’s still work to do, but it finally feels like a book is taking shape.

And all because I went back to finish something I’d started.