Why haiku?

Again, I don't really know.

When I started writing seriously again in January 2021 (more on that later), I was thinking about a lot of different directions I could go, and trying to listen to the directions my passion wanted to take me. 

I started a crazy story about a couple of kids who move to Mars (lots more on that later), jotted down some notes about some other hazy ideas that floated through my brain, and remembered a couple of old haiku I had written way back in high school:

always the water
pounds the sand
looking for nothing

and

old men press buttons
while the next generation
can only ask why

And I thought, hey these were pretty good. Maybe I can write more of these - in fact, maybe I can write them for my kids. So I wrote a new haiku:

haiku for my kids
seventeen syllables to
tell them everything

And then I thought, I bet I can match this up with a picture and it'll be even cooler:

And it was. And then I made my very first Instagram account, and I started writing haiku every day.

And you know what? It turns out to be a really helpful tool for my fiction writing. It helps me exercise my writing muscles and forces me to be concise and precise. Plus it's a lot of fun!

I hope you enjoy the haiku too! Let me know if you have a favorite. 

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