You’re very kind, Anna!

I enjoy working in form because it forces my boring little brain to get out of its usual ruts, and sometimes into more interesting territory. In other words, a form will force me to choose words or even ideas that aren’t already at the top of my list.

There’s a little trick to making a rhyme scheme seem “invisible,” and it’s to enjamb the lines — to break them in the middle of a syntactic unit so that the reader doesn’t stop on the rhyme. It’s the opposite of the end-stopped line, which stops at the end of a unit of thought, or even at the end of a sentence.

Iambic meters, unlike rhyme, come a little too naturally to me, but I have to be careful to vary it up to avoid the sing-song tone of a Hallmark card!