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Kinkakuji, Kyoto

The first three quarters of 2011 was spent doing a lot of the fiction writing along with developing my two other blogs. The last part of the year ended up mostly tied up in technical writing gigs, which, though it was awesome being paid to do something that comes easily to me (I seriously felt like a bandit), were not exactly fulfilling on the creative front. So I've decided that for 2012, I am challenging myself to write something creative every day. And not just anything: I'm going to write poetry. 

Though I have written too many poems and even had a few of them published, I do not generally consider myself a fan of poetry. Let's face it, there are mountains of crap poems out there. Maybe even gas giant planets full. So I decided to pick something that I do enjoy, the moment. I like to think that modern poetry is like a photograph; one moment in time frozen forever. (This is probably why I enjoy the Twitter and Facebook status formats so much.) So I chose a medium that tries to capture moments, the haiku. 

For the next year, I am going to attempt to write and post one haiku a day. I can't promise every haiku is going to be precisely "cutting," or include a seasonal reference every time, but I do promise to try my hardest to keep to these basic characteristics, as well as utilize the 5-7-5 syllable format, the closest we can get in English to the Japanese on. (Check back later for my further explanation of what haiku means.)

This blog will quite possibly often mirror events in my Life From Ann Arbor blog, or even Adventures in Food & Word since those two occasionally cross each other already, though I do hope to make it its own entity. 

In case you were wondering, the background image is a photograph I took of Osaka Castle in 2003 during my brief stay in Japan. Osaka is one of my favorite cities in the entire world, and I may end up rotating background images to showcase her. 

Anyway! So that is my goal. Read daily if you wish, or come back and read at random. I will try to tag the haiku and we'll see if we end up with some different themes. I don't promise greatness here, I only promise that I will do my best to meet my own demands. That being said....

Please enjoy! \(^.^)/