Episode 925: Never, Never, Never, Never, Never

Finally finished the four-part poem. Haven't e-mailed Michael Hulse yet, as I want to get to at least five new pages before I send over anything for him to look at. Maybe it's because I've been re-reading what I've written so far so many times over the past couple of days, but it's really bugging me how often I repeat certain words like 'never', 'still' and 'yet'. Literally went through 330 lines of poetry, trying to reduce the frequency of their occurrence without drastically altering the sense of the lines. I know it's statistically unlikely given my writing style to get the average below 10, maybe even 15, but it just kind of stuck out like a sore thumb once I noticed it. Especially 'never'. You'd think I could find other ways of sounding emphatic, but apparently not. (Then again, Shakespeare did have that line of perfect trochaic pentameter with Lear's 'Never, never, never, never, never', so maybe I shouldn't be too hard on myself?) Now that I've hit 11 pages out of 30, I think I kind of deserve a break for at least a day or two. It's back to reading books that are completely unrelated to my coursework! Or I could, well, revise my business French vocabulary.