{"id":14989,"date":"2015-12-21T09:36:38","date_gmt":"2015-12-21T15:36:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=14989"},"modified":"2015-12-21T09:36:38","modified_gmt":"2015-12-21T15:36:38","slug":"so-i-wrote-a-poem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2015\/12\/21\/so-i-wrote-a-poem\/","title":{"rendered":"So I Wrote A Poem…."},"content":{"rendered":"

In the middle of September, Instapundit linked<\/a> to a call for submissions on Jerry Pournelle’s blog<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Accepting submissions for a new volume of the There Will Be War series. Send with cover note to submission@therewillbewar.net. Stories should preferably be 20,000 words or less. Poetry encouraged, but see the previous series; it needs to make sense. Hard science fiction mainly; urban fantasy with a military theme possibly acceptable, but mostly we want hard, realistic stories. They need not be action adventure; good command decision stories encouraged. Space opera always considered. Again see the previous nine volumes. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was struck pretty instantly with an idea: update Rudyard Kipling’s “Tommy<\/a>” by re-writing it from the perspective of a cloned cyrogenically preserved mercenary called a Canny. Okay, the name came first and the conceit almost instantly thereafter.<\/p>\n

Man, the idea came fast, and I wanted to do it, but I was a haunted man this summer. Timing on various and sundry life activities left me little time to complete projects that I wanted to do. I’d started painting the interior of the house, but didn’t finish, leaving a room half painted; I’d meant to refinish my deck, but I’d only done the inside of the deck, where I could see it on the deck; I have a couple of items on the to-write list that I could certainly place if only I sat still long enough to write them; and so on. I wasn’t finishing anything I started. I was almost paralyzed with self-doubt regarding this idea for a poem.<\/p>\n

I mean, in the old coffee shop days, I filled legal pads with sonnets and poems, easily scratching something out in an hour if I wanted to or felt inspired. But lately, writing something is harder than pulling middle-aged teeth as the infrequency of this blog attests. Somehow, a gap emerged between the inspiration\/idea and the effort to carry it through.<\/p>\n

I did a little research to procrastinate: I ordered one of the earlier volumes of the series to see what kind of poetry it contained. It had Kipling<\/em>. I thought I was in like Dave in an emergency airlock in 2001<\/em>. I mean, if I wrote a poem and it turned out any good.<\/p>\n

So in spite of my recognition of my recent non-successes, I was determined, and I discovered a gap between determination and doing something. Probably the same gap between inspiration and doing something: laziness or disbelief in an effort resulting in the desired result. Still, I started carving out a half hour every morning. I’d drop my children at school and duck into the local coffee shop to work. I fully expected nothing more to come of it than coffee drinking. Did I mention paralysis in self-doubt? It wasn’t so much paralysis as actively working against myself. <\/p>\n

I started out with a laptop so I could do a side-by-side comparison of “Tommy” and what I was putting down, but I quickly switched to a printed copy of “Tommy” and a legal pad. I was dismayed to find out the poem was in iambic heptameter; to someone seasoned in sonnets and iambic pentameter, that seemed a little syllablely, but over the course of four weeks<\/em>, I managed to eke something out.<\/p>\n

And then when all the lines and syllables were filled, I reached the next Hamlet moment: How much do I tweak it? Should I share it with science-fiction savvy Internet connections to see if it works? It was Hamlet and<\/em> J. Alfred Prufrock time. Could my darker side dither long enough for the submission period to close while I was tweaking and transposing stresses?<\/p>\n

Finally, one Saturday morning, I just emailed it in a moment of “What’s the worst that could happen?” By Saturday night, it was accepted.<\/p>\n

Today, There Will Be War Volume X<\/a><\/em> was released in a Kindle version.<\/p>\n