The second book syndrome

One way or another, second books (like second albums) can be tough. Partly the urge and ambition goes after the first book, and if you publish your first book late, it might contain the majority of your lifetime's best writing so you'll have little left. Or maybe you've laboured over a novel for years, workshopping chapters before getting it published. You land a 2-book deal, but the 2nd book will have to be written in a way that's totally unlike that of the first, and to a deadline. Or maybe the first book used up all your autobiographical material and you don't know what else to write about.

Having published a poetry pamphlet and a story book (both "first books" in a way) I feel that I'm doubly suffering. But all is not lost. The factors influencing the selection of items for the first books meant that some viable texts failed the cut, and I've added to my corpus since the previous publications. Currently my Acknowledgements sections for my second books are

• Prose - "short fiction","Staple", "Panurge", "Stand", "Aesthetica", "Journal of Microfiction", "Dream Catcher"
• Poetry - "Acumen", "Agenda", "Assent", "Cake", "Envoi", "Fleeting", "Horizon Review", "Iota", "Mobius", "Morning Star", "The North", "Other Poetry", "Resurgence", "Seam", "Smiths Knoll","Staple", "Vers Poetry Anthology", "Weyfarers"

I think I need to pump these up with some headliners, which ties in with my 2013 objectives. Winning a prose competition would help, so I'm sending stories off. Poetry-wise I'm targeting a few magazines that I've never appeared in - Magma, Poetry London, etc.

Also, I've decided to get onto Twitter, as @TimLoveWriter, though I've not tweeted yet