Think I figured out why I have trouble reading some people..

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Have you tried poetry? Not little love poems poetry, but epic poetry like Beowulf, or the Iliad, or the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, or Shakespeare, or Carroll's poems?

The fair breeze blew; the white foam flew; the furrow followed free.
We were the first, to ever burst, into that silent sea.

Down dropped the wind; the sails dropped down; t'was sad as sad could be.
And we did speak, if just to break, the silence of that sea.

All in a hot and copper sky, the bloody sun at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand, no taller than the moon.

Day after day, day after day, we stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship, upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, everywhere, and all the boards did shrink.
Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink...

(That's from memory [a forced memorization from my highschool days], so any differences in organization and paritular wording are my own.)

Good fortune,

- Icarus is a content engineer...

I find with very long, unparagraphed sections of text, I highlight shorter sections using the mouse, and that makes it a lot easier to avoid getting lose in the mass. Otherwise I think I can jump from line to line, it takes a lot of concentration not to get lost in the midst of things.

What happened to Calandale?

That was great from memory.

When you say you are a content engineer, what do you write? I like to come up with ideas for plays, skits, comedies and used to write poetry. I don't like writing poetry anymore.

Come forth story digestor, I await your translation.

From what I can gather, it sounds as if you are describing an author that is choppy with their writing style and did not complete a profile of a character.

Someone who may trail off forgetting about a character that could bring more depth into the plot.

lol, that was actually difficult for me to decipher, lol. No clue why-I think the numbers threw me off, lol.

I like that passage; it's always stuck with me for some reason; the lines ring in my mind like lyrics of a song.


I write developer documentation, which in terms of writing, is about as far away from creative writing as one can get. But a need to express myself as a creative writer is one of the things I do in this place. I describe my job in more detail here. The term "content engineer" is no stretch or exaggeration; people in my job need to deal with many things beyond writing, such as presentation, organization, discoverability, writing to multiple audiences, etc. Whether we do a good job of it (or are put in a position where it is possible to do a good job of it) is another matter, but it is an interesting problem space.

I've never written much poetry, but I've started to do a bit of off the cuff stuff recently, and enjoy it; I may do more. I'll take your place in the lattice of poets if you like. In all likelihood, I'll probably end up writing songs, since to me many songs seem like poems put to music, and I like the extra dimension that the music ads to the art form. One of the other reasons I remember those poem lines above is that I've put them to music, and often sing them to myself. But that song is incomplete.

Good fortune,

- Icarus hears music in his head...

It was interesting to try, but I'm not going to start writing like that; others can make that style work, but it is not for me. I think I actually distracted myself as I was writing like that; paragraphs form small blocks of thought for me, and as I did that line by line, it got really streamy really fast as I jumped from thought to thought. My writings here are typically stream of consciousness, but I see now the problems with setting the packet size too small or too large.

Medium sized paragraphs, like these and the ones I just wrote to Kitsy are what I'll stick with for now.

BTW, I like your art, and especially your poems.

Good fortune,

- Icarus needs help with tattoo design...

Try Spider Robinson, or most of the works of Robert Heinlein (Stranger In a Strange Land does fall prey to the wall-of-text problem, as does Time Enough For Love, but most of it is in shorter paragraphs).

You know what I like about the writing here? Most of the posters have at least a basic grasp of punctuation. They know a sentence is ended with a period, not with a vague thought that maybe the poster should have put a period there. They also are no strangers to parentheses to set aside a sub-statement in the middle of a sentence.