On Mon, 2 Jun 2025 20:32:00 +0100, Timothy Collinson wrote:

>Completely unrelated to Traveller, I've just had my very first tanka
>accepted by Quail Eggs (a new tanka journal) which - given the editor is
>rather exacting and has high standards and it was the first tanka I've
>composed, I regard as quite an achievement.
>
>Of course, said editor didn't accept four others I sent in, so there's lots
>to learn yet!
>
>Anyway, I'm chuffed.

Congrats! To have one's first attempt accepted for publicatoin is an
achievement in virtually any creative endeavor; in an exacting poetry form
is doubly so.

For those who are interested, there is good information about the _tanka_
form at https://en.wikipedia.org/Tanka

A number of years ago (no, I will not acknowledge just how long), on the
Usenet newsgroup soc.history.what-if (dedicated to postings and discussions
of alternate history), there was a challenge of sorts involving tanka,
which were defined slightly differently from the above wikipedia entry -
the 7-7 couplet could be _either_ before or after the 5-7-5 hokku.

The challenge was as follows:

A tanka (57577 form) was posted on an alt-hist theme. Each subsequent
particpant would post a tanka of their own, also on an alt-hist theme (but
not necessarily the same alt-hist), in the alternate form (i.e., 77575 if
resonding to a 57577; 57577 if responding to 77575), specifically using the
terminal couplet/hokku of the previous entry. Obviously, the same tanka
could not be posted twice in any thread. Additionally, the tanka (in toto)
had to allude to an _identifiable_ alternate history, generally identifued
by specifying the point-of-departure (i.e., when it became different from
"real" history).

I've always thought it might be an interesting exercise to try something
similar, but with Traveller theme(s); I've never been quite sure how to
define "theme identification" for the purpose.

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