by CC @ 09:41
Submit a caption for each drawing in the New Yorker Caption Contest throughout the month of December. This will involve writing maybe one sentence (or sentence fragment) per week, so make it good. Each should be brilliant and original; shoot to make yours the winning entry, or at least one the top three chosen out of the thousands upon thousands of submissions each week. Submit online each week, and also forward the text of your submission for posting on the Commuter Challenge website.
New cartoons are posted each Monday. You have until the following Sunday to submit a caption. The first contest for this Commuter Challenge will open December 4th.
Hint: don’t go for the easiest gag – if a seemingly good caption immediately jumps to your brain, ask yourself whether or not it’s likely that dozens or hundreds of others had the same thought. If so, then you should probably consider trying something different.
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by CC @ 13:20
Write a ghost story suitable for reciting at a ghost-story-reciting-type-situation: say, around a campfire with a flashlight held under your chin, or in the drawing room after a formal dinner while trying to top each others’ gruesome anecdotes over snifters of cognac, or late at night during a pyjama/slumber party with all your pre-teen girlfriends. So it should be more suitable for narration than for reading on the page (or at least as suitable), and it should be of an appropriate length. Shoot for anywhere from 500 to 2500 words. Try not to let the reading time go for more than ten minutes or so; a comfortable reading speed is around 150 words per minute.
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by CC @ 14:06
Write a response, sequel, retelling, or companion poem to some famous poem. It should be in a similar format, and ideally it should be about the same length, unless you’re responding to something like Faust or Beowulf. (In this case, though, it might be preferable just to respond to a famous passage, rather than the whole poem.) Use your own judgement as to what constitutes “famous”.
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by CC @ 00:01
Write a sonnet about superconductors. Fourteen lines, strict meter, and please choose any accepted rhyme scheme (there are several possibilities that way). Don’t know anything about superconductors? Neither do I, but that just makes it more interesting and challenging. Think this challenge is too easy for you, and you can rattle off such a sonnet in a half hour? Then take the month to craft a really really really good sonnet about superconductors.
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