This is my great pseudo-epic, and you can pretty much rest assured I'm never writing anything this long ever again.  At least not anytime soon.  This was, for all intents and purposes, an experiment.  I'd had the name Desdemona sitting around for a while as a potential title (for anyone who's in the know knows that I have this tremendous list of titles and words to give me inspiration to write from), and I'd wanted to write something sort of throwback-ish because the name is itself fairly antiquated.  I don't know exactly when I started coming up with the idea for the plot, but I knew when I sat down to write the opening line that I was shooting to make this one as long as I possibly could.  The first thing I did was to select the names of my two characters; Desdemona was a given already, but I needed a masculine name that wasn't overused and perhaps a bit comical in its poesy- therefore, Mathias.  From there, I had to give them something to do, and I believe it was on the phone with my best friend early one morning (or late one night depending on one's perspective) that I came up with the idea of a romance between two people that never got carried out because the two of them would always go to the other's house at night to profess their love and in so doing, always miss each other going a different way.  It was somewhat one of those cruel twisted ideas that has brought few smiles to my days being able to devise, but it also seemed to work well epicly and poeticly, and I decided even if it never worked out at the length I wanted, I could always trim it down to a more respectable size.  So I began to write, and the first obstacle I faced was giving my city a name; in this I lucked out a little by selecting Fair, because the whole theme of the poem is that nothing is truly fair.  Then, as I began to work through it, I found myself in the odd position of having to throw in lots of historical references, something I don't usually do; do you know how hard it is to find famous names that rhyme?  But once I got past that, it was pretty much smooth sailing from there.  This has been the longest I've ever worked on a poem continuously, part of which probably involves its sheer length, but I spent about 2 weeks writing it in clusters.  I wanted to paint a picture of two people from completely opposite sides of life who don't really know each other but who fall mercilessly in love in the instant they meet (call it my own version of Romeo and Juliet if you will), and so I had to show exactly how different and yet how similar their lives really were.  Alot of the Desdemona imagery comes from Loveline, which I've become engrossed by of late, so that should make some sort of sense.  But alot of it is skewered by my own personal ideals and morals and philosophies, which is something perhaps I need to work on for the future.  Other than that, there's really only one thing I can think of which needs some clarification, and that's that Desdemona's mother's name is Dawn, but also she is meant to be a child of the goddess of the dawn, Aurora, or in other words she is a golden child of more than human bearing who has somehow fallen from her grace.  It works both ways.  And originally, I just wanted Desdemona to become pretty much another town slut and Mathias to go off and get married under his father's will and have things fizzle out perhaps or perhaps have them meet again some time later in life and completely not recognize each other and find disgust in each other, but when I got to that point in the poem I realized the direction I took was more personally satisfying.  I especially didn't want them both to die, one of them had to opt out of their life the easy way, but one had to suffer on and endure miserably only to rediscover their long lost love later on in life dead but clearly indicating that they had felt the same; I had to go with the logical choice on this one.  And so I wrapped it up around 526 lines, which exceeded my goal of 400 and my distant hope for 500, so while I'm not entirely pleased with the way it flows and gets overly sentimental and droopy in places, I'm pleased I was able to sustain the effort.  It was an endurance test for me, and I feel I passed.  But you can judge for yourself.