Thus revealed, the creature buried its nose in the tire-tilled soil...
May 15, 2011
Vampire Haiku inspiration
Category: Books

I just read a book!
The title: Vampire Haiku.
It was amusing.

I'd never really thought about the existence of novellas in haiku, but that's pretty much what Ryan Mecum's Vampire Haiku is! It's not really a continuous story -- the book is presented as the haiku journal of one vampire, and mostly they simply consist of observations and that aren't necessarily connected -- but there is a certain consistency and there are references to past events. Most of the entries are also dated, though a lot of time passes between written dates -- sometimes decades. The book is only 137 pages yet purports to span nearly 400 years (it begins in 1620 and concludes in 2009).

Anyway, it's not a particularly deep book (and I wouldn't have paid the $9.99 asking price for it; $1.99 is a much more palatable price for something one can read in a half hour or so), but it is rather clever and fun. This is one of my favorites from it (you'll enjoy this too, Mickey), for obvious reasons:

Those were not vampires.
If sunlight makes you sparkle,
you're a unicorn.

The boldface is in the text, too (in general, I was as amused by the bolding of certain lines as the content of them), and there's even a little drawing of a unicorn next to the poem. Hilarity.

Anyway, I was very amused by the book -- but more importantly, I'm inspired! Those familiar with Scary-Crayon will note my love of haiku (the very first ongoing feature on SC, which started on the site's launch date, was A Crayon Haiku), and I'm always coming up with haiku even though I mostly don't write them down. But now I not only want to start a haiku journal for my own personal amusement, but am thinking about other things I can try with the format. Maybe haiku short stories or a novella of my own?

And here's an idea -- toy reviews in haiku. Could be fun, and I think it'd be a fun way to distinguish my toy reviews on SC from the more tedious and thorough collector-oriented reviews I've written more recently and which are more appropriate for Articulated Discussion. I've also been thinking about what to do for potential contests on SC, and now the answer seems so obvious! At one point I was thinking crayon drawings, but having folks write haiku is probably a lot less of a challenge and is arguably more in keeping with SC's tradition. The site's had haiku since day one, but most of the artwork I've posted on SC was actually done with markers.

Counting syllables
I ponder many projects
experimental

But now I'm hungry...
what to make for dinner? OH!
Oatmeal burrito.

I'll go do that, then,
and end this blog entry here.
Thanks for reading.

:mrgreen:

-posted by Wes | 10:45 pm | Comments (2)
2 Comments »
Reply to Jaime!