All Wrong

Being self-taught, what I thought was Haiku did not follow all of the rules and a friend and fellow writer pointed out my errors. I knew the syllable count of five for the first, seven for the second, and five for the third line and that is the way I wrote. My friend Jan McLaughlin writes books on the how to’s of poetry and has done hours of research on the different types.

Jan is trying to help me with my next book in the Tommy Two Shoes Mysteries Series. She has designed the front and back covers and is helping me put my stories into Create Space, a self publishing company. It’s not that I didn’t like my former editor; it is the matter of costs. Any cost that I have, is passed along to the reader and increases the price to the point, some cannot buy it. I did donate one copy of each book to the Mount Pleasant Library, so the stories were available to anyone who would care to read them.

But back to the point of Haiku, I am reviewing and rewriting all of them, and there are hundreds. She explained that I cannot use prepositions nor can I use words ending in ing. I would like to publish a book of Haiku poetry when I publish Partners for Life, the next book in the Tommy Two Shoes Mysteries Series. The reason I am concentrating on the Haiku book is I have so very many and I already started to draw thumbnail sketches to accompany every couple of the poems. I do like to read poetry, but when the pages are filled with only words sometimes my mind wanders from the words. I thought pictures would help to show my vision of the words. Jan says that the pictures actually take it from Haiku to another brand of Japanese poetry, but I will cross that bridge when I come to it.

So I have been extremely busy this week so far: dentist Monday, doctor’s appointment Tuesday, babysitting and church today, meeting on Friday, church and meeting and Sunday. I managed to squeeze in time to mow and wash one load of clothing on Tuesday.