Saturday, December 18, 2010

New blogs and old prose. (And a dab of romance.)

So I am updating again!  Hooray!  Right now I'm in the process of finishing the lyrics on a couple of songs.  I'm also working a song parody project, and I'm trying to finish up a fan-fiction serial I've been writing since earlier this year.  (Yes, I do write fan-fiction.  At the risk of sounding like an even bigger nerd, it's World of Warcraft fan-fiction.  Most of it belongs squarely in the humor section.) 

Anyway, I've started to link to blogs and Twitter feeds that I read fairly often.  Some of them are written by people I know, some are not.

Should I mention now that I have acquired a boyfriend?  Perhaps so--this is a personal blog after all.  He's amazing, and you can read his random thoughts about life and musings on chess at http://www.liquideggproduct.com/.

And now, I have an old story for you that I wrote a few years back.  It was published in one journal or another.  It's to tide you over until I have new writing for you.  Or recordings.  Something!


Thursday, December 2, 2010

Before I forget.

I do keep forgetting to post this, and I've had it written for weeks.  Poetry school continues!  Tonight, I bring to you the sestina, possibly the most irritating form ever.  It is a thirty-nine line poem.  The first 36 lines are grouped in six stanzas of six lines each, then a three-line "tercet," also called the "envoy."  Envoys are usually addressed directly to the person or thing that the rest of the poem is about--but not always.

The sestina becomes more difficult in that you choose six words as "ending" words for each line.  You have to use them in a set sequence, like so:

123456--first stanza
615243--second stanza
364125
532614
451362
246531
And for the last three-line stanza, it's 2/5, 4/3, 6/1.  Though you can do other forms, that's the one I used.  And to make it harder on myself, I chose to make rhyming pairs of words.  Most sestinas don't rhyme.  It's just far too difficult, because you want to try to choose words that have more than one meaning, so you don't sound like you're repeating yourself.  The best sestinas don't sound like they are using the same words over and over.