#Sestinas are really fun and also very hard to write

[perahn]

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97

NINETY-SEVEN

Really, Jade?

I could burrow through all my files and folders and WIPS and I might perhaps find twenty. I certainly can’t given you random snippets about all of them, some are only a line or two, and there’s one that’s completely incomprehensible.

SO

Here’s a list of things I found going through my WIP files:

- about six lines of a Fenris sestina

- about five of a Tarva vilanelle

- four of a Frog/Glenn sonnet

- two attempts to start a story about selkies and the way children see their parents’ relationship, which I will probably never write now

- a beginning of a story about dragons and the moon

- rough notes for a ME2 story reflecting my experiences playing that game without ME1 (Shepard’s memories were not recoverable)

- rough notes for a Fenris in Mass Effect story

- a start on a straight DA2 story, some of which turned up in Sort of Beautiful

- notes for an extremely ambitious ME thing, set in the next cycle after Shepard failed to stop the Reapers (mostly on the appearance and social organisation of the races descended from varren, pyjaks and space cows)

- a Rapunzel retelling, possibly with selkies in it

- something about aliens and memories

- something about selfies in the space age (this, I think, I might be able to finish one day)

- Sand as the KC’s father and how that changes NWN2 a bit. I want to finish this, I really do, but I don’t think it’ll happen

- a thing for @oleandersone wherein Quinn and Sand commiserate on imminent fatherhood and how their significant others don’t appreciate how hard they’re fussing

- 3000 words of Vaiira and Quinn going to the opera, followed by outlining for how the events of the Eternal Throne stuff affected them (won’t be finished as I’ve never picked the game back up)

- 1300 words of Sith foreplay (I don’t know either)

- Quinn receiving a letter from Vaii to say she’s not dead after all

- “WHY was I thinking about Quinn and allergies on Makeb, late orbital spring, and Vaii having to play nurse?“ - in its entirety

- 7500 words of Tabris and Zevran which I began writing for @ashara-art TOO MANY YEARS AGO and is actually still pretty good. I should either finish this or just whack an ending onto it and post it up so I can stop feeling guilty about it.

- 4000 words of a NWN2 soulmate AU, starting with Nefris and Akachi and ending in Safiya and Sand. Heavily inspired by Quark’s one. also you can have a snippet of my notes for this one:

Javari, two-dagger rogue. Bishop on her palm, arrow scar through that hand. Bishop resented fiercely, Duncan’s niece, branded, trapped. Still attraction, love from J, but not healthy, warped and twisted. J is CN – longed for freedom, understood B’s reaction, thinks of B as wolf in trap, snapping at hand that might’ve released him. Lots of guilt and hurt. Bishop had gouge in calf where repeatedly tried to carve her name out of him.

- the only Inquisition thing I ever tried to write, which was Vivienne and Bull commenting on my Cadash’s ill-fated attempt to tell Varric she was in love with him

- a very angry Hawke making her own ending to DA2

- Through the Fade. This is never going to happen. I can give you a factoid, though: this is where my Cadash was born. She was going to be a side character in this story before I a) decided I had too many already and b) stopped writing it.

- Untitled Backstory Dump. Khem is taken to the Red Wizard Academy at the age of five and survives to graduate. Currently about 20k words and six years, and if I ever manage to get it to the point where she kills off the student who’s currently making her life miserable, I’ll post that much. Random factoid: this has a supporting document listing significant landmarks, instructors, bits of timeline, kills, levels and spells which I virtually always have open while writing anything for Khem. There are, so far, 7 named teachers and their subjects, plus a high-ranking cleric of Kossuth in the Infirmary.

- Khem’s Codices. The big one right now. Random factoid: the dreams she will have in the next codex will actually refer to the events of a session that @codenamecynic‘s excellent husband ran for us while DM onemooncircles was out of commission. It was a non-canon session (the characters were in an elven ruin at the time, not fighting giants on a mountain)  but was a lot of fun and deserves commemoration.

- I am also teasing out the details of a thing about a haunted house; not sure if I’ll write it but I maaaaaay

- I half-promised Cynic I’d try to do something from the perspective of Cort Raghnall, but since she’s taken up that particular gauntlet herself I’m not sure I will/can

- I have a feeling I’m forgetting something I owed someone

SO

that’s not 97 things, but I hope you feel you got your money’s worth.

[shadowtearling]

hey! been thinking about poetry recently and 1) would you ever post or publish any and 2) what do you think of structural (more "traditional" poetry i guess) verse more freeform poetry or even something like rupi kaur? is there any style you prefer to read/write? this is always a discussion that's super interesting to me like no shade either way, i just think the evolution of & the way we think about poetry is fascinating!

hell yeah i love talking about poetry!!!!

i have posted some here but i’m not proud of those pieces???? lmao i’m trying to figure out what’s the best way to share with y’all esp since my work is on the longer side. and because i love playing with formatting, and the moment i try to share, tumblr eats all of it away and parts of the meanings i was trying to generate have gone. i would love to share mostly bc i would like feedback to see what people are responding to!! if you want to see/read them, they’re here but they are vastly changed since i posted (i love the process of revising poetry it’s even better than writing imo) 

i think there’s value in all forms of poetry! when i first started writing (and for a long time), i only ever wrote in free verse because i was scared of structure and believed that my work’s quality would decrease for the sake of maintaining form. i was wrong! i just had to look and try harder to create pieces i would be proud of! i think what’s really fun is trying to think of ways in which form would enhance content! for example, i struggled for a long time with writing a sestina. but in understanding how it worked (the cyclical nature, very repetitive), i found content that would be aided by the form: grief. i wrote about the stages of grief in the sestina and the way the different stages get muddled together by the end is exactly how going through grief feels like! it was such a fun experience for me. i also think, free verse CAN be difficult to tackle. i like being mindful about punctuation and format. what would a strikethrough do that erasing it completely would not? what do those indentations do? free verse can be hard if you don’t know where to go with it. 

i’ve shared opinions of rupi kaur’s poetry (i’m not the biggest fan) HOWEVER, i do still think there’s value in it even if it wasn’t for me. that brand of poetry feels to me severely unpolished (because poetry is not just about the words we say but also how we say it and how we present them on the page!!) kaur, specifically, has potential to grow as a poet but not if she continues to bank on only one-word line, surface-level poetry. 

reading-wise, i’m ready to try anything! i tire easily of the contemporary poetry popular on here but i’m always open to having my mind changed. i’m trying to slowly read the romantics. honestly im just a sucker for beautiful words (even if i don’t understand them all the time)