Valkyrie

Right, @Krista?

This is what happens when you regularly bathe in chocolate fountains.

You might want to lay off the beer for a little while, Steve Chocolate fountains are NOT for bathing in

This was a tough story to write, since there was so much to juggle, but I think it ended the way it needed to. Thanks for the awesome comment

OMG yes I was flung off those things more times than I can count!

Wait till you hit 50. The not giving a frig amps up sooooooo much more And yeah, us '80s kids totally know how to keep swimming Great interview!

Right, @Myr?

Steve's pretty good at making up his own rules

Happy Hour at Steve's!

It varies depending on where you live. In Western New York, we call it pop, but once you start heading east, like Albany area, they call it soda. Soda pop is just

this is the look I get starting at about 5:00 pm until I do the right thing and give Knighty his nighttime nummies.

Who'd have thought there were so many different cabbage gifs?

Great question. It comes down to nurture vs nature. How many of Hank's issues was he born with and how many were created by his upbringing? I doubt Danny cares; he's just glad Hank can't hurt anyone else anymore. Thanks for commenting!

For some reason, the gifs aren't loading properly for me, so Cookie Monster it is

Aditus and I did some brainstorming, and we have come up with a new twist for the prompt blog. We'll still be featuring our usual Prompt Team prompts, but on the second Friday of the month, we thought we'd try something different. We will start the story, and then ask you to continue it in the comment section. On the fourth Friday of the month, we will post the completed story in the blog. Since today is Valentine's Day, we came up with a theme of love gone accidentally right. I'll start: Jason leaned against the stone wall and set his backpack down at his feet. He smoothed out the crumpled map of the zoo and traced his finger across the labeled exhibits. "Lions and tigers and bears... oh my, where are the freaking capybaras? I swore they were just past the elephants," he muttered. He'd been looking forward to seeing the renovated capybara exhibit for months. "I think I took a wrong turn at the otter exhibit." He yelped as another zoogoer suddenly slammed into him, tearing his map. "What the hell?" Now who wants to continue the story? I can't wait to see where this leads!

Before I get into today's blog, I just want to say how thrilled I am that submissions for both anthologies have started coming in! I'm loving the enthusiasm. You guys are what make this site so amazing ⭐ Now back to today's regularly scheduled blog feature... One of the reasons I chose the theme "Diversity" for our poetry anthology is because poetry is... well... diverse. There are so many forms to choose from, and exploring those forms can be a fun aspect of writing poetry. Including several diverse forms in an anthology entry is one way to address the theme, while giving the poet free rein content-wise. Included in the Genre section under the Writing tab is a list of all the genres available on the site, along with definitions of said genres and subgenres. There is an extensive list of different types of poetry and their definitions. I will link to the genre page and also copy and paste them below. I can't wait to see what poetic forms our site poets decide to offer us! Poetry - Various poetry types in the system. See sub-genre descriptions for details. Ballad - a poem that tells a story and was traditionally set to music. Usually follows a form of rhymed (abcb) quatrains alternating four-stress and three-stress lines. Blank Verse - a poem with regular metrical but unrhymed lines, almost always in iambic pentameter. Cinquain - a short poem consisting of five, usually unrhymed lines containing, respectively, two, four, six, eight, and two syllables. Cinquains may be paired and manipulated to create longer forms. For example, the mirror cinquain has lines of syllables 2, 4, 6, 8, 2, 2, 8, 6, 4, 2. Cinquains are often used in teaching schoolchildren early forms of poetry. Confessional - Features intimate and personal revelations, often drawing on the poet's own experiences, emotions, and struggles. Ekphrastic Poetry - Responds to or describes a work of visual art, capturing the essence of a painting, sculpture, or other visual medium through words. Epic Poetry - a lengthy narrative poem, typically set in the far past, involving heroic and extraordinary adventures and dealings of people with gods or other superhuman forces. Free-Verse - poetry that follows natural speech patterns, but does not rhyme or follow a regular meter Ghazal - A poetic form with rhyming couplets and a repeating refrain, often exploring themes of love, loss, and longing. It has its roots in Arabic and Persian poetry. Haiku - a short poem of three lines with five, seven, and five syllables respectively. While there are several schools of Haiku writing, the most faithful to the original will use some aspect of the natural world as its subject, and will not contain any personal references to the writer/observer. Limerick - a poem that is typically humorous and bawdy, written in five-line, predominantly anapestic trimeter with a strict rhyme scheme of AABBA, in which the first, second and fifth lines rhyme, while the third and fourth lines are shorter and share a different rhyme. Lyric - a poem that expresses personal feelings or emotions, typically written in first person. There are several general groupings of lyric poetry, including elegies, odes and sonnets. Mixed Forms - a mixture of two or more forms of poetry Rhyming - a poem containing two or more words that repeat the same or similar sounds in the final syllable, usually placed at the end of lines placed so they echo each other Sonnet - a poem of fourteen lines using any of a number of formal rhyme schemes, typically containing ten syllables per line, traditionally using iambic pentameter. A sonnet must contain a turning point (or, volta), in which the thread of the theme changes direction. There are three main sorts of sonnet: Italian (or, Petrarchan), Shakesperean, and Spenserian; each of these has a different rhyme scheme. The Italian rhymes ABBAABBA CDCDCD or ABBAABBA CDECDE; the Shakespearean uses ABAB CDCD EFEF GG; the Spenserian ABAB BCBC CDCD EE. Translation - a poem translated from another language https://gayauthors.org/stories/browse/genre-tag/