something is happening

So to catch you up a bit:

I got a stomac bug the next day after my last post which laid me up in all sorts of horrible intestinal ways that I will spare you the details of. Then I went to my in-laws place to visit. My wife had gone over two days before leaving me alone with the toilet in my illness. Which is probably just as well because I'm a big baby when I get sick and I wouldn't want to inflict anything on her, also it pretty much guaranteed that if what I had was catching it was also mostly quarantined so nobody else has to suffer because of me.

My wife's parents and younger sister live out in the country and it's always a treat to visit them and their many cats (they have four of them!)

I'm working up the nerve to begin on the second draft of Inferno. I'm still ten cantos away from the end but I'm going to run out of notebook pages soon and I want to start working on it again in a way that will keep the momentum going.

I have inadvertently done some of the later stanzas in Iambic pentameter and I have been weighing the pros and cons of introducing a uniform cadence to my interpretation. Iambic pentameter would give it a more classical feel and it works nicely with the strict syllable structure I've chosen however I'm not certain I can do it deliberately and it would mean that I'd have to re-write 95% of my own work entirely and I might not be able to keep some of the stanzas I'm most proud of. I've been using this inner debate as a reason for not beginning the second draft, I've wanted to talk it over with two writers I know and respect but one is impossible to get on the phone and never replies to answering machine messages while the other I see often enough but I have to go to his book store if I want to have a conversation and he has to sell people books so our conversations take twice as long to say half as much.

I think though that while there is a real temptation to re-work my Inferno again to conform to a classical western meter I think I might be further tempted to let these technical issues hold the work back.

I definitely need to re-word parts, some of the earliest cantos might be better rewritten all together but that notwithstanding I think I have to get down to it. After all it's only a second draft and I'd like to give out a hand full of copies to people for review before I do one more pass at it and try sending pieces to publishers. I wonder how many places will reject my work...