Haiku Madness! A Retrospective

I'm sure the world has waited with baited breath for the results of the haiku competition I mentioned last week. Well, I lost. I'm pretty sure someone had to cheat in order for me not to win. But who knows. Out of the (literally) hundred or so haiku's I came up with, at the last moment I went with this one:

I fear for my life

For now my spider monkeys

Have become Ninjas

After looking at it for a few days I see that I had better ones in my discard pile, but my closeness to the whole thing made me lose perspective. I wasn't capable of judging my better ones from my lesser attempts.

I'm sure there are lots of lessons to be gleaned here. The most obvious being that it's important to separate oneself from their writing before deciding that it is good or bad. In the fires of competition I ended up going with one of my most recent attempts instead of some of my earlier work, which I discounted without reason.

For example:

Shot by a laser

Square in the back, that coward

Frank is such an ass

Is that award winning? Um, probably not. But after a few days I like it better than what I submitted. Well, lesson learned. Sit on my current novel for a couple of weeks before I send it out to everyone on earth. Got it.