I tend to avoid the whole structure issue (when I'm writing it, not reading it) unless I'm sitting down to write a villanelle or a sestina or a particular structure. Otherwise, I just let it rip.

But I very much liked that one, Steph, because I love the sense of individual vignettes all leading down the same road.

Well, I've had my fights with vilanelles and pantoums. But the idea of losing time and then losing a line per stanza was too good to pass up.

I may be the next great voice in light verse. Just you wait.

I may be the next great voice in light verse. Just you wait.

Hee! I believe it.

And besides, you could offer it as a course should you happen to open a writing school.

Somewhere other than where you are, that is.

I'm just saying....

I didn't even get the losing a line... Yes, it's proven, I'm a poetry moron.

"Cherry" is my favorite. But, sad to say, I appreciate "Coda's" state of mind. Not sad that I know how you feel...you know.

"Cherry Girl" still makes me grin. And I love the "losing time and then losing a line per stanza" thing.

Yup - daylight savings time, 4-3-2-1, ending on "shorter". A perfect gestalt.

What's not to lurve?

You people are good for my writerly self-esteem. Thanks!

I adore my husband.

When I was having issues working out what happened next in "Matty Groves", he suggested I drabble the possibilities. The drabble is the tight little 100-word-precisely form used for the Sunday 100 fics.

I was hemming and hawing and not knowing what happened to start chapter 7. So he said, drabble. And I sat down and this is what came out:

She sits on the borrowed bed, surrounded by chintz and sentiment.

Behind her eyes there are monsters; memories of horror lurk like chimeras, just beyond her recall. A falcon screams, there's no air, she can't breathe, penetration and violation and rage and a sense of perverted ownership aimed straight at her, in the twisted soul of a ghost, a man dead four hundred years.

Somehow, she has to remember. She has to see.

She doesn't want to.

The monster behind the curtain blinks its odd-coloured eyes. Lifting a hand like the falcon's talon, it pushes the gauze of memory aside.

---

I think I'm a-gonna keep this one, and use it. I now know what happens next; I just wrote the first three pages of it.

Drabble is my friend.

Yay, Nic! Deb, that's a gorgeous passage.