Hi, moongazers! The theme for this month was “brave but foolish decisions”:

• I battled a skunk at 1 am and won 🦨​
• I wrote some weird poems! and a proof about sestinas!
• And some microfiction for a contest!
• And... not the novel...

Current Phase

I started the month camping in the Sierras. Glamping, really—tent-cabins, dining hall, tie-dye. Not exactly roughing it. I did forget to lock up the snacks one night, and was awoken at 1 am by a skunk dragging the entire snack bag past my pillow. I followed it out and made myself scary (at a reasonable distance), and fortunately it ditched.

Then I took the children (ages 3 and 6: brave, foolish) on a 700-mile road trip to visit my parents for two weeks. “Wow, Jessie, two whole weeks with parental assistance? You must have spent it working on your novel—” Wrong! The latest AI scandal got me thinking about the way humans approach algorithmic generation—and about change ringing, and Steve Reich's Piano Phase—and I invented a form I’m calling “rotational poetry”, which I briefly described on my Tumblr.

And then someone (hi Don!) reminded me that sestinas already exist, so I wrote half of one and then realized: sestinas are thirty-six lines long. Who has thirty-six lines of sestina in them?? I experimented with the sestina’s end-word-swapping algorithm, and discovered you can write a perfectly good tritina (9 lines, 3x3) or a quintina (5x5), but, interestingly, not a quartina: the 4-stanza variant has one line whose end word never changes. It turns out that for n-inas with n=3x+1 stanzas, there exists a unique fixed end-word at line (2n+1)/3. (i.e. a 4-ina has a stuck word at line 3, 7-inas at line 5, 10-inas at line 7, etc.)

And then on the way home from my parents, I rediscovered that I'd signed up for a microfiction contest back in January (brave! foolish!), and had to write a drabble on my phone, in the car. I can’t really post an excerpt from a 100-word story, so you just get the title: “You Are Likely To Be Eaten”. (By a grue.)

Between all of this I got... a few pages of the novel? That self-imposed Halloween deadline is looking a little dicier now, but I will persevere.

Quick Link

Speaking of foolishness, someone anonymously uploaded Cliff Johnson’s “The Fool and His Money” to the Internet, and you guys, this game was made for me specifically. 78 crunchy little puzzles and a tarot narrative with weird evocative art? Yes please. Unfortunately the ending is bugged, but if you love word puzzles I recommend it anyway.

Looking Ahead

By the time you hear from me again, my children will both be in school and my entire life will be different.

See you next time the moon's full!