Groundhog Haiku Contest

So as you all know, we had the official Groundhog Party last week, and there was the ever-popular Groundhog Games of Skill. This year’s slate of contests included Tossing Cards into a Hat, Drawing a Groundhog with Your Eyes Closed, and Groundhog Speed Haiku.

That’s right–in five minutes or less, contestants had to come up with their best groundhog-themed haiku, and party goers then voted on which haiku was the winner.

Naturally, I’m going to share those haiku with you now, because when you’ve got a bunch of groundhog haiku, that’s not the sort of thing you just sit on. However, I’ve decided that it would be much more interesting and fair to open the joy of creating groundhog Japanese poetry to the world in general.

Let’s have a contest.

I’m removing the time constraint. You’ve got as long as you want to come up with your haiku. Well, at least until entries start drying up. We’ll let it go at least a week. Once a week has passed and I don’t see any more entries flooding in (because I expect there to be *so many* entries), I will pick the top five haiku, and then I’ll put those five up for a vote to you, my faithful readers. At that point, you’ll all be able to vote for a week or so, and then I’ll declare the winner.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a cool contest if we didn’t have some sort of cool giveaway, would it? I’ll be running another Vodnik contest soon (to give away some e-copies of the book), but we just had one of those, and I feel like I’m shilling the book just a tad much right this second, so I’ll mix this one up a bit. The winner of THIS contest will get to have his or her name (or a name of their choice–within reason) immortalized in my next book, Tarnhelm. (Note: you’re not going to be a major character, but your name will appear in the text itself, not just the acknowledgments page. Also note that I can’t guarantee this book will ever be published, seeing as how I don’t have a contract for it. But who knows–it could be the next smash hit, right? And there would be your name, for the whole world to see.)

Sound fair?

For those of you who don’t know, haiku are three lines–the first is five syllables long, the second is seven, and the third is five again. That’s all the constraints you have, other than the fact that it has to deal with Groundhog Day somehow. (Doesn’t have to be about the film, but it can be.) Remember, you have essentially two audiences here. First is me–I have to like your haiku enough to put it in the top 5. So you need something that’s going to appeal to me. But then you also need something that’s going to appeal to all my billions of blog readers.

Decisions decisions . . .

You’re welcome to enter the contest as many times as you like. But each entry has to have a new haiku, and I’m only going to select one haiku per entrant when it comes to the final round.

To get your thought processes churning, here are the entries from the party–I’m already including all of them in the contest (to ensure that we at least have some entries, no matter what).

Those are some pretty strong entries. Think you can beat ’em? Start Haiku-ing!