- For once, the winter weather arrived on schedule.
- The pellets are pelting.
- And not hardly melting.
- As I sit here and wait.
- For the coffee to percolate.
- …
- I’m stopping.
- I rewrote the end of The Raven to give one of my buddies a hard time last night.
- Was kinda funny.
- Also a little bit trying too hard.
- I’m not a poet.
- I appreciate them, the poets, a great deal, but it’s not one of my gifts.
- I took poetry, a whole year of it, in college as part of my minor, but never really developed any sort of affinity for it.
- I won’t even claim I understand it.
- So.
- Yesterday’s list.
- Wasn’t supposed to be one. It just kind of … happened.
- Here’s the follow-up: Did not have a biscuit for lunch yesterday, nor one for dinner last night, nor one for breakfast this morning.
- And probably not one for lunch.
- So the yearning keeps on burning.
- And he gets the biscuit nevermore.
- Sigh.
- I’ll figure something out.
- Find a biscuit recipe with no eggs.
- (No, I’m not writing about bread again today. Probably.)
- What I did appreciate about poetry was the lyrical aspect of writing, how adding things like tempo and rhyme to normal prose can change how the reader reacts to your story.
- I don’t do enough of it in my fiction.
- There’s a fantasy author, Patrick Rothfuss, who slips into rhyme and verse so smoothly you scarely know he’s doing it.
- Now, if he’d just finish his bloody trilogy.
- Been more than 10 years since his last book, book two. Ten years we’ve been waiting for the climax of that particular tale.
- I have no hope he’ll ever actually finish it.
- Guy has crippling anxiety.
- I assume it’s a similar situation with George R. R. Martin.
- That dude is never going to finish Game of Thrones.
- I mean, why would he? He has silly money.
- Some writers are fueled by discomfort.
- They write to salve the wounds of life and to conquer the beast of boredom.
- Dan Simmons, in Hyperion, has a poet for a character, and there’s a line he says about the best place for a writer is prison.
- He’s probably not wrong.
- The most consistently productive I’ve ever been (writing fiction) was during a five-month stay in a foreign country where I couldn’t really speak the language.
- In real life, you have to figure out a way to fit it in amongst all your responsibilities.
- One of my buddies (not the one the revised Raven) always throws up that quote, and I can’t remember what it’s from, but it goes: “Sometimes, I do what I want. Most of the time, I do what I have to.”
- That’s getting a little grim.
- While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
- As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
- “T’was the sleet,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door – only this and nothing more”
- Stay warm. Someone make some biscuits.
Ham-Handed Thoughts of Poetry
skepticlysm 
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