
That'll teach you, won't it!
Of course just to make it easier on yourself you start out with the harder form.
Funny you should bring up sonnets. I feel the same as you about them. I read a whole bunch a couple of summers ago hoping to warm up to the form but the one or two I've done are pretty sad. I'll post one some time soon. I can't seem to stretch them to pentameter, so I end up with sonnets in tetrameter, or more honestly, eight syllable lines (can't say they're iambic).
But the reason it's funny you bring it up is that I was thinking of talking about how Keats and his friends used to write sonnet letters to one another. Can you imagine? In some ways it's cool--writing poem letters back and forth. But they were all writing sonnets back and forth to one another. I read about this in a biography of Keats. It was one of the jaw dropper moments in the book--to think that people valued poetry in that way and that the writing of it was so common as to be a mode of expression in letters among young men.
BTW, the biography was John Keats: The Making of a Poet. I highly recommend it to anyone, not just poetry lovers. It's one of the best books I've ever read--and I don't normally go for biographies.