Pondering a Haiku

In its Western form, generally, it's a seventeen syllable poem with its lines conforming to five syllables for the first line, seven for the second, and five for the third. Why? Who the hell really knows.

There are nuances: nature, a last line that either brings the first two lines together or maybe goes elsewhere but still has somethng to do with the first two lines.

I wonder about short, literary things. They take less time to compose and they are more easily digestible than the forms that require a lot of words. Anybody know the differences?

A funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to the Forums

As a writer it's good to join some of the better writing forums. You learn a lot, you ask questions, and you give answers when you know the answers. (Some folks give answers, however, when they don't have answers.)

On the other hand, as a writer it's also bad to join writing forums when it cuts into your writing time. The rationalization is persuasive: "Hey, I may not be writing, writing, but I'm still writing," and, "I'm among writers--so what that I'm drawn to a thread like 'What's Love got to Do with It?' and 'Do You Really Like Wicker?' I'm still among writers; therefore, something good will come of it--who knows? Maybe someday I'll write a romantic novel...or if I get a wicker chair my muse might sit with me more often."

The real problem is that I play too much at the forums. While i'm in MSWord I'd be writing something for submittal and get stuck on something. My mind suddenly loses the "flow," and in its place is the fact that I'm only two clicks away from finding out the best places to buy good quality wicker.

It's worse when you're a humorist. On the boards the bon mots tend to flow like bats out of caves at dusk, puns burst out of double entendres, jokes have half the posters splashing their screens with nostril-spewn diet coke...well sometimes; we writers also have vivid imaginations. The two clicks away also gives near-instant gratification. If I continue writing my short story, or an essay, the finished product takes too long. And then it needs to be mailed, and two or three months down the road I'll get a response. And there's a chance that the response will be a rejection.

So, just two clicks and I won't have to endure all that waiting. Writers are mostly a reclusive lot. Once the internet arrived writers became too cyber-social. They no longer needed to worry about dressing, showering, brushing their teeth. Not that we practiced such ablutions before the Internet, but now we can be as social as normal folks without the normal folks refusing to inhale in our presence. So, now that we found that odors are somehow filtered out once they hit our modums, we're as confident as the non-writer.

Click...click.