Another year of Pepys erasures rolled up into a free PDF. And before New Year’s for the second year in a row—a testament to my greater discipline this time around.

I’ve settled into a routine of starting work on the erasures second thing in the morning, right after I come in from the porch. Most of the time this leads to a satisfactory poem in less than two hours, though there are occasions when I have to keep coming back to it throughout the day. Regardless, I always start by looking at what I came up with ten years earlier, and this year I’d say at least 75% of the time I’m able to reuse something from my first go-round.

It’s a real morale-booster to see how much progress I’ve made as an erasure poet over the past 12 years, though I sure don’t mind it when my earlier draft doesn’t need much work, and I hope to find a lot more instances of that in the coming year.

You can find the download links for all eight volumes compiled so far in the top-of-page description of the Pepys Diary Erasure Project at Via Negativa.