Haiku

New Things for a New Year

/ unspywriter / Leave a comment

You may have noticed two tabs missing from the Home page of the blog, replaced by two new ones.

My beloved Flash! Friday micro fiction weekly contest is no more. The moderator decided it was time to focus on her own writing. I’ll miss my weekly dragon queen’s offerings, but at least she stopped for a reason I can understand.

I hadn’t participated in Friday Fictioneers in quite some time. It’s still a lively and vibrant site and definitely a place to go if you want to practice writing short, short, short fiction, as in, 100-word fiction. I feel that between Flash! Friday and Friday Fictioneers, I learned a great deal about flash fiction, and I want to move onto something new.

To show I haven’t given up flash fiction, take a look at the new tab “RSC Mini Stories.” Journalist and author Jennie Coughlin has started posting a daily photo prompt using Rory’s Story Cubes on her Instagram account. She posts her own mini-story there, but I’m using the photo prompt to write some flash fiction on my blog. There have been seven prompts so far, so seven mini-stories for you to read.

The other new tab on my blog is “Haiku.” I’ve loved the Haiku form since I learned it in high school and college. I’ve recently learned, however, that the five-seven-five syllable set-up is bogus because of the differences between written English and Japanese. A modern, American haiku is still three lines (maybe) but is generally between ten and seventeen syllables. So, I’m going to give a haiku a day a try. Because 2016 is a leap year, that’ll be 366 haiku–if I’m up to it.

I’m going to use Rory’s Story Cubes for this as well. Each day, I’ll post a picture of three cubes, and I’ll write a haiku based on my interpretation of them. And that the fun thing about Rory’s Story Cubes: They can mean whatever you want them to mean, and your imagination can run away with itself.

I encourage you to join me in both endeavors and post your mini-stories and/or haiku in the comments on each of my posts. And let’s have fun.

Writerly Contemplation

/ unspywriter / 1 Comment

I was up early this morning (happens when you go to bed early) and decided to clear my head for next week’s sojourn at Tinker Mountain Writers Workshop. After breakfast, I took a cup of Tazo Zen green tea and a book of short stories to the front porch and plopped myself in one of the Adirondack chairs, making sure my new planting from this week was in sight.

It must be the Druid in me who gets sad when a tree dies, and though I wasn’t particularly fond of the arbor vitae’s aesthetics, I hated the fact that, after surviving an infestation of bag worms last year and appearing so healthy and green in early spring, it began to die from the top down. Then, I looked upon it as an opportunity to replace more of what the house’s builder considered landscaping with something I liked.

Shot from my comfy chair on the front porch.

So, on Thursday, Tech Duncan welcomed this newcomer: a lovely little Japanese maple under which the Buddha can contemplate for eternity. This morning I sat so this was in view as I drank tea and read, my only company some birds and the occasional bee. I became calmer than I had been all week and engrossed in studying how the light breeze stirred the maple and how the sun lit it.

And the writer in me shifted from my comfort zone–prose–into something poetic. I thought the new tree needed a haiku to honor its place at Tech Duncan. Believe me, a haiku is definitely preferable to what my Irish grandmother did for her African violets–pricking a finger and feeding them her blood. Since I don’t have a poet in residence, that composition was up to, gulp, me.

Now, I’m not a poet, something that I need to change one day, but the tree, the light, the breeze evoked this (All my poet friends, just quietly snicker behind your hands; no guffawing, please.):

Maple trembles from
Sun’s lustful touch; leaves quiver
From satiation.