Yesterday was a very satisfactory day as finally I managed to get the house really clean: dusting, bathrooms, floors, laundry, stove ashes, furniture polishing, spiderwebs, houseplants, everything. Meanwhile, Tom was downstairs reaming out his shop. The combined project took hours, and we never ended up taking our walk, but we did change our filthy clothes late in the afternoon and go out for a drink, so that was a pleasant ending.

This morning we'll get in the walk that we missed yesterday, and then I'm going to turn my attention to reading page proofs for my book. I've got so many obligations this coming week: editing, meetings, class planning, plus my sister's family will be here on Tuesday and Wednesday, en route from college tours. If I can finish the proof checking today, I'll feel a smidgen less overwhelmed. 

On Friday, I did begin transcribing some pre-poem pieces out of my notebook, so during cleaning breaks yesterday I kept checking in with one of my infant drafts, five minutes of tweaking and tinkering here and there throughout the day. It's not a bad way to revise, in these tiny compressed sessions, and I always feel better with a poem simmering on the stove, especially when I'm on my knees scrubbing the linoleum behind the toilet.

I recommend this kind of quick-revision strategy, especially if you're a person who naturally conceives of revising as a massive cloud of killer bees ready to paralyze you with their sting so why leave the house. My solution to the killer-bee problem is to bring a draft up on my computer so that it's sitting there in my way whenever I open the lid. I always forget that it's there, but when I go to look something else up, the poem says HEY so I glance at it and quickly switch up all the stanza breaks from 3 lines to 4, and, huh, well, that changes what's going on, doesn't it, what if I get rid of this phrase, what if I add another few details here, what if I change all the verbs to present tense, what if this poem is really about how I feel about my dad, and five minutes later I go back to scrubbing. If I repeat this event five more times during the day, I end up with an actual deep-clean revision session, plus the housework gets finished.

Maybe, as a freelancer and an ex-stay-at-home mother and farmer, I have become more practiced than most at juggling many apparently unrelated tasks simultaneously, and also at making snap decisions about priorities, and also at dealing with distractions such as screaming and loud saws. Still, you might try the two-for-one approach to revision. An advantage is that it has trained me to think of revision as rest, not as chore. When I take a break to revise, I'm letting the chores slide, I'm reclaiming my private thoughts, and they delight and shock me. It's invigorating to switch back and forth between exterior demands and I'll-say-whatever-the-hell-I-want-to-say-but-I'll-say-it-as-best-I-can.