Or should I say, let me take you on an outing with my secret love.

“Who?” you ask.

“Poetry,” I whisper.

Those of you who’ve read Shadows Fall have probably guessed that I’m a huge fan of William Wordsworth and Emily Brontë. I’m a poetry fan, all the way around. I love dead poets, old poets, young poets, and poets yet to be born. While writing that novel, I feared that I’d bore all the non-poetry fans with my unrelenting references to poems. I held back as best I could. For instance, I wanted to quote the entire body of Wordsworth’s “Daffodils,” and the entire portion I was then familiar with of Emily Brontë’s “The Prisoner.” Which reminds me, until recently I was only aware of five stanzas of that Brontë poem, beginning with:

“He comes with Western winds, with evening’s wandering airs,
With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars:”
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Writing is risky. Especially writing fiction. As Forrest Landry points out in his latest post at For The Trees, alarm and ire have arisen over the number of writers who give up these days and self-publish. He pointed to a blog post by E. Ann Bardawill at Something Fell, on The Killing of Mockingbirds. She used Richard Adams’ Watership Down as an example, and that drew me in because it’s one of my favorite books. (more…)