DrBacchus' Journal

A sestina is a poetic form. It consists of six-line stanzas, with each stanza's lines ending in the same six words, in a different order for each stanza. Then there is a final stanza, called the envoi, in which each line contains two of the six words.

You can see examples of sestinas here, or provide your own six words to see what form comes out.

It is incredibly hard to write a sestina that doesn't sound forced, and hardly anybody ever manages it. A really good sestina, when read aloud, is not immediately identifiable as a sestina. It just sounds like there's a rhythm in there, but you can't quite place it until you read it that third or fourth time, and see it on a page.

Most sestinas, however, work for the first stanza, and possibly the second, but after that you feel that the author is just saying any old nonsense just to stay in the form.

Sestinas work best when they are about a repetitive topic. Examples might be a child's game, or an addiction, or a daily event. So I thought that the latest topic on Inspire Me Thursday - Breath - would be ideal for it. Unfortunately, so far, it just sounds like, after the first stanza, I'm merely babbling to fit the form.

I've had a really hard time writing lately. Everything feels forced, both fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. I keep hoping that if I force it long enough, it'll start to flow. But the pump refuses to be primed.

I've been looking for a decent tool with which to write a book, and haven't haven't had much luck.

Pages is nice for laying out stuff, but although it does a Table of Contents nicely, it doesn't do indexing. I've been told that there are templates that do indexing, but I haven't had any luck in finding them.

Word does indexing, of course, but it's so amazingly difficult to add an index term that it actively discourages one to do it.

The process, by the way, is:
* Highlight term
* Click on "Insert" -> "Indexes and tables"
* Click "Mark Entry"
* Fill in the term that you wish to appear in the index.
* Click "Mark"
* Click "Close"

Simply having a shortcut key to highlight and mark, or perhaps highlight, right-click, and mark, would greatly increase the effectiveness of this process. If I don't index while I write, I don't index.

I could use DocBook, and probably will, but the tools for converting DocBook to anything else are SO geek-centric that I find them profoundly tiresome to use. Having to spend an entire day researching and installing and configuring in order to write content seems excessive.

And of course, I could go back to writing LaTeX. Once I get back into the swing of it, I imagine that it would be the most efficient thing to do. But the output tends to be a little on the sterile side, and it's hard to do specific layout like image flow, sidebars, and so on - although I'm sure that a dozen people will respond and say, it's really easy, you just follow this 12-page HowTo. Oy.

Anyways, if someone can simply point me to a Pages template, that would of course be the best of all options.

For the most part, though, it's frustrating that one either has to be an uber-geek in order to use any of the readily-available book authoring tools, or spend a lot of money on some other tool.