Sonneteer

(in)Frequently Asked Questions

No one has asked any questions yet, so I’ll just make up some questions that I think people might or ought to ask, and answer them instead.

Why poetry?

Because it’s fun. For all its ponderous overtones in the modern world, poetry (definition: speech in which the rhythmical structure dominates the grammatical structure) poetry is basically jazzing around with words. What could be more fun than that?

Why sonnets?

Because I like them. Although someone once said that you’d have to be a dullard to be unable to write a sonnet, and a fool to want to write more than one, the form is perfectly adapted to creating a little three-act play with a pithy epilogue, just what’s needed to move a story on in small pieces.

Are you the actor? Or related to the other actor?

No and no. At least a dozen people with significant Web presence share my exact name, and many more have the same last name, and while I am indeed some of them, I am not that one of them, and I am not related to any of them who are not already me.

Why is this blog so ugly?

Because I know SGML, XML, XSLT and the words to the DSSSL Song, but not much CSS or PHP, particularly as they apply to WordPress. My friend Max pointed out ComicPress as a possible source of less-ugly themes, but although extremely cool they are too comic-centric for what I want. Google doesn’t turn up any poetry-specific themes, only themes with “poetry” used metaphorically in the name.

Why doesn’t anything happen in this story?

This one someone actually asked me, at least implicitly. The answer is that this is my first experience with this kind of story-telling, and I didn’t want to pack the plot with too much stuff early on in case it proved to be more than could be handled with this extremely limited form. The first three months are going to be fairly slow, with lots of oblique angles–it turns out that the medium really is the message in this case: Will’s character is being conditioned by the medium through which his story is being told. The medium can’t take too much happening at once, which makes Will a rather indirect and slow-moving kind of guy, outwardly brash but in fact rather hesitant where matters of the heart are concerned. Maybe we’ll find out more about why that’s so as time goes by.