Haiku Madness!

Of late I've been plowing through John Scalzi's Old Man's War novels. I read the first one a couple of years ago and really liked it, then never bothered to read another in the series. Well, I saw Zoe's Tale for four dollars a few weeks ago and figured I should go ahead and pick it up.

Thanks to a ridiculous amount of snow that fell last week I read it, being cooped up in the house left me with few other options. I did not realize until I was finished that I was reading out of sequence. It didn't matter, the book was awesome and I didn't care that I skipped some installments. I have just about caught up with the missing pieces since.

Anyway, I visited his blog the other day and noticed that he was running a contest to have a character in his new novel named after you. Cool.

The contest? Write a haiku. Now I must confess, I've never attempted one before in my life. I think I'm one of the few writers in existence that has almost no appreciation for poetry. But he laid out the outline for his contest and I decided to participate.

The rules: Seasons not necessary, must be about death by spider monkeys, bad GPS directions, lasers, or spontaneous human combustion.

I must have wrote a hundred. It was so much fun. Here are a few of my rejected attempts:

Many ways to die

For me, the absolute worst

Drunk spider monkeys

The spider monkey

It toys with me in the dark

Then it strikes me dead

I could not fathom

How a tiny beam of light

Would cut me in two

Combustion is great

Inside of a car or truck

But in me, not good

Okay, enough of that, I have a small batch of ones I think are pretty good that I won't share now. The contest lasts through Sunday. I'll stew on them for a few days and whip out my very best.

Wish me luck.