deep autumn
learning to live
with the dark
(originally posted at Haiku-doodle as a comment to Margaret Dornaus’s blog post “Deep Autumn“)
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I’m continuing what has apparently become my Thanksgiving week tradition of saving myself the work of writing a whole new haiku every day by stealing from myself. Specifically, by stealing the haiku I have dribbled around in other places across the Interwebs, like Facebook and Twitter and other people’s blogs. (I did change the line breaks here a little from the original. Does that make me less pitiful?)
I might do this for a few more days, at least until I finish my stupid novel, or the 50,000 words of it I’m supposed to have written by the end of the month anyhow.
(In case you were suspecting me of violating my sacred vow to write haiku every day, I am still scribbling the things down, but I would not be so cruel as to force you to read anything I’ve written lately.)
Red Dragonfly 
I had a teacher once who said the most important word (or at least the most accented one, the one that’s lingered over) was the last word of a line. Still love this haiku, Melissa, only more so with the revision.
Thanks, Margaret. That advice of your teacher’s is an interesting piece of information to consider when pondering line breaks. I have been known to change the line breaks in a ku back and forth from one state to another a dozen times before actually posting, and I’m usually not sure even then whether that’s how I want them.
Great ku, I agree with Margaret %100.
And tell us about your novel(length project)?
Thanks, Ash.
Oh, well, about the novel…it’s to do with NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) which if you haven’t heard of it, you can Google it and find out more than you ever wanted to know. Basically you’re supposed to write at least 50,000 words during the month of November, and ideally complete a novel, or at least contribute 50,000 words toward the draft of one. I actually finished my 50,000 words yesterday but I have nothing resembling the completed draft of a novel, although I think it’s possible that I have finally discovered which direction I want my novel to go, and I definitely had a lot of fun when I was not whining about the annoyance and burden of all those words hanging over my head all month. 🙂 Who knows, maybe I’ll even finish it some day …
Of course, NNWM! I have been tempted before to try it, but this year I got the yearbook at school and it’s due tomorrow, so Novemeber was completely and utterly (to clutter this sentence with adverbs) out for me.
Cool that you got a direction out of it, did you find the pressure good for getting stuff done (and not just whining, which I always do myself when I have a deadline)
Well, maybe next year. 🙂 I’ve tried it before and never won, but this year I roped my husband and son into doing it with me and we all won — I think the support-slash-competition helped a lot. I am especially impressed with my son who got up at 5:30 every morning to write, passed 50,000 words on the 24th, and finished his novel on the 27th — a complete and very funny novel. Also with my husband who got home from work last night with 35,000 words under his belt and staggered into the kitchen at 10 this morning announcing he had won. 🙂 (Although I’m very interested in how coherent those last 15,000 words are …)