The Commuter Challenge

Create a dust jacket for one of your favorite books. No restriction on the kind of book (fiction, nonfiction, other) or the type of illustration, other than it be created by you.

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Write a set of three double dactyls. (Consult Wikipedia for a concise explanation of the constraints of the double dactyl.) You can pick anyone and anything for your subjects. However, what you do not get to choose are the single-word lines. Instead, you must use the words in this list:

• Organizational
• Sentimentality
• Unsatisfactory

Use each one only once per poem.

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This month’s challenge is: Sonnetfight!

Throughout the month of October, we will follow the challenges on songfight.org, but instead of recording songs we’ll be writing sonnets.

If you’re unfamiliar with songfight, how it works is simple. Periodically a song title is posted to the website. During the next week anyone can compose, record, and submit an original song with the given title. All the submissions are then posted to the website, and voted on to determine the winner.

We’ll be skipping over the voting part of the process, but otherwise we’ll be following their lead. When a new title and deadline is posted, you have that much time to submit a sonnet with the given title. All entries will be posted to our website immediately following the deadline.

Sonnet Fights

• Due October 5th: “Ring Them Bells” [optional warm-up round]
• Due October 15th: “Monkeys on my Back”
• Due October 25th: “Who Needs Sleep”
• Due October 31st: “Welcome Home, Frank”

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The Commuter Challenge awakes from hibernation with a simple task: Create a crossword puzzle. There are no requirements other than to conform to the standard requirements of (American) crossword puzzles. (Consult http://barelybad.com/xwdrulesreal.htm for an overview of the requirements.)

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Edit: The Commuter Challenge for this month was cancelled after the fact due to lack of participation. The Commuter Challenges went into hibernation from January to August 2009, to be resumed in September.

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