about

This is a general blog by Megan O'Neill, launched in 2025. A decade ago, I wrote about video games. It's been a while, but I want to blog again.

I don't have a particular topic this time around, but I love to read and to write, and I'm good at coming up with questions to self-learn. Maybe the someone that is you, dear reader, will enjoy the journeys I go on.

I have always written long sentences, but particularly more so whenever I practice German. I come back with long-winded English sentences, mainly since English can't box-phrase, and my time/manner/place is all out of joint. Vergeben Sie mich.

post schedule + newsletter

I usually have a feast-and-famine cycle of writing. I'm still new to the newsletter game, so I'll have to play around with how those work before anything becomes super regular.

Maybe if this becomes regular, I'll think about getting paid for it again.

"sonnet seeker"?

I like free verse poetry as well, but form poetry particularly delights me. I especially love the sonnet form, how compact and dense it can be. Perhaps paradoxically, I delight in how difficult it is for me to write my own sonnets, such that I seek out the opportunity to try it again and again.

There's a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke in one of his many letters^[1][2] that I love about what the sonnet form does:

Da ich vielfach mit der Übertragung altitaliänischer Sonette in den letzten Wochen beschäftigt war, ist mir, über beständigem Umgang, diese Formgestalt eben wieder recht lebendig geworden. Wie sehr vermag sie doch auch uns noch recht zu sein, die innerhalb der verpflichtendsten Bindung eine fast gesteigerte Freiheit gewährt . . .

Because I have been working over the last few weeks on the translation of several old Italian sonnets, this form has been strongly revivified for me by virtue of my constant preoccupation with it. How pleasing it still is even to us, this form that permits an almost intensified sense of freedom within the most restrictive of bonds.