I got it, I got it too! Only because Hec got it first you'll just have to trust me.

Hey Erica, this might seem incredibly petty and nitpicky, but your story has a number of missing spaces.

Like in this bit:

Your movements in the kitchen are both slow and deliberate.Katie takes this as a struggle;most able-bodied people do, in your experience.

there's no space between "deliberate." and "Katie", or between "struggle;" and "most". Maybe it's to do with your computer problems, but I just thought I'd mention it because I couldn't help being a little distracted by it.

It's now up at [link] (give me a moment to finish downloading the new Telnet client so I can reset the stupid permissions thingie so yis all can view it.) erika, I really hope you don't mind, I took the liberty of putting those spaces where they should have been, hit me if I shouldn't have? It seemed like a nice idea the time. I'll change it back if you care, I still have the original.

[unfunny doublepost!]

cereal:

you're playing the Elizabethan first letter code thingie game.

These days, darling, we call them acrostics.

Very clever, Lizard- I like it.

Erica- I've put your story on my 'to read' list, and I'll get to it in a day or two, at which point I'll try and give you some feedback, hopefully helpful.

These days, darling, we call them acrostics.

I liked the way you worked that hidden structure into the imagery of the poems too. It wasn't just an exercise - it was a little key to open up the box of the poem.

I'm so dense about stuff like that.

I'm happy with them.

Because I was sitting in class just thinking about the word sting-- a stinging sensation, police sting, bee sting, Sting as a name, sting as a noun, sting as an action. And then I was mulling something for a poem and veered away into string. Stringy texture. String of pearls. String of phrases. Cheese string. Collecting string. Stringing you along. Picking up string (our novelist friend's phrase for when you're researching for a new story without a wholly clear understanding of how exactly you're going to use it.) I couldn't let it go.

I wrote another today. In, er, class, again. While listening to the lecture-- it's like doodling. Interestingly I can do this half-attention for the sociology class but for the lit-crit class I need to pay full attention to the lecture or I drift off altogether.... probably because the sociology class goes so goddamn slowly, because it's full of fucking idiots. ... But that is neither here nor there.

WHAT'S LEFT WHEN



Spoken as if you had the nerve for something, woke up & 
Moved to the window first to shut it. Slipping frward
Under doorsteps. Step me a shrine, a wail, a wait. 
Digging in earth. I'll steal yr babies; I'm trees & shock of air; the 
Gleaming leaves & exposed roots. My bottle's full when yrs is
Empty. I'm sliding backwards. My name is mud.

This may be a generational thing, but what is the literary difference between "your" and "yr"? Also, frward vs. forward. I'm assuming that a poet of your talent did it on purpose. Which vowels, which words get chosen and why? I think I'm hopelessly old school, non-traditional spellings jar me completely out of a work.

It's not something I do all the time-- I tend to use it in the more, er, avant-garde of the poems. When I'm looking for a voice that's slightly more ansty-feeling, a little fast at the mouth, a little eliding or sliding away its vowels. I'm quite fond of the insta-effect it has on the tone of a poem. It's *supposed* to be jarring. I'm picking it up from a fairly-recent postmodern/hip-hop tradition in poetry (Ntozake Shange would have been the first poet, I think, that I read to have done it) but you can see it in a lot of nineteenth-century/pre-modern casual, everyday writing. Even the baroque elegance of the ampersand has been co-opted into this shorthand. Which I find pretty amusing.

As to which letters I cut out-- it really rests on which ones I can get away with dropping and still have my reader understand what I mean. In that last SMUDGE acrostic, I actually spent a few moments with the find-and-replace making all the "the"s "th"s, or the "to"s "t"s, but it didn't really work. Fairly well-established ones are wld, cld, &c, &, yr, yrs. Sometimes I really *want* to abbreviate something like "you" or "are", but I *really* don't want to head into the child-on-the-internet course of, you know, "u r to b 4 me 4ever"-- that's no longer kicky and interesting, it's ugly and kiddish.

It's a fairly personal thing, obviously.