Spookymilk Survivor X: Half the Conversation

Last any of us had heard, the Vogons were killin' it. I mean killin' it. Not to spoil everything, but that's still the case.

On the other hand, how did I do? The team still has my name weirdly attached to it, after all. I have to keep up the high standards associated with the "Nibbish and His Vogons" name. Read on for the answer.

This week's challenge was "Half the Conversation". Spooky provided us with half a conversation, and tasked us with filling in the holes (thereby providing the other half of the conversation). Here's what I came up with...


The phone rings at 5pm. It wasn’t supposed to ring until 7pm. There is no way that this call has any kind of good news. I pick up the phone.

Coleen’s voice comes to life on the other end of the line. “You missed a call.”
That doesn’t sound right at all. She knows I’d never ignore a call – not with the project nearing completion.

“Sorry about that. Bert must be furious. Should I stop by the office later to patch things up?”

“Yeah. There’s no reason not to.” comes the even-voiced reply.
Something’s up. Bert is an untrustworthy rat – one whom Coleen despises. Someone’s listening – someone that she’s afraid of. I need got to know what I’m dealing with.

“Did Charlotte ever pick up those test results yesterday?”

“No. She never did. Neither did I, for that matter.”
Shit. That means I have a stop to make en route to the safehouse. It also means that this is probably the last conversation Coleen and I will ever have, and I have to fill half of it with code words to try to shake down the poor woman for information.

“I’ll pick them up on the way to the office. By the way, are we still on for Sunday?”

“At the Fall Festival?”
Things get worse. Coleen’s doomed, and unless I get moving, I’m next. The line is tapped, and the spooks must be with her. No need to keep up appearances.

“Can you imagine if they’d gotten anything out of that poor bastard from the survey team?”

“Yeah, that would have been a disaster.”
It already is. There’s nothing left to do but say goodbye and make my preparations.

“Tell those bastards that we haven’t forgotten Franconia. No matter how many they brain-fry in those machines, it won’t stop us.”

“It wasn’t personal. They don’t see things the same way you do.”
That gets a bitter chuckle from me. Even in the face of the mind-raping she’s about to receive, she’s still got that glorious black sense of humor.

“I’m sorry for dragging you into this.”

“You’re not the only one.”

“You don’t blame me?

“Absolutely not.”

“It isn’t right, what’s about to happen to you.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“Same thing you’d do… I’m going to run. Goodbye, Coleen.”
With that, I hang up the phone and press the little black button underneath the second shelf in the kitchen twice. The next person through the front door gets immolated, and when the time is right, the rest of Coleen’s killers will wish they’d gotten off that easily.

Here's the judges' critiques:
K: Wow. This is a great dark tale, and it reads seamlessly, going from heavy narration to a quick back-and-forth and never losing steam. This was a lot of story in a small space, which is really all I ever ask. 5

DK: Nicely done. Great premise, lots of tension building up, and the conversation fits together well too. 4

The nice thing about working tons of overtime on overnight shift if that you get a lot of time to yourself to think (the down side, if you were wondering, is literally every other thing). When I first saw this challenge, it seemed intimidating, but because of my interesting work schedule, I had the time to come up with (and cruelly reject) well over a dozen different scenarios. Eventually, I decided to pay the story I had made for the create-a-challenge in season eight (the one with the three pictures that takes place in the dude's mind). The characters are all different, and only minor allusions exist (the original draft was a lot more explicit about the continuity, which I decided was stupid, since I wasn't exactly working with Star Wars canon, or anything. The protagonist alludes to "brain frying" machines, and "that poor bastard from the survey team" - not particularly direct (in fact, I'd be shocked if Spooky even realized it, since I wasn't really going for "sequel" so much as "basic story framework").

I sort of dislike writing in the present tense. It's hard to keep track of (I had to scan this one three times to make sure I didn't put any past tense narration. More importantly, it always feels put on and false when I write it. There were a couple of transitions that I initially felt didn't flow well with it, and I almost trashed the whole thing about halfway through. Eventually, I decided to just tough it out. I alternated wildly from "way too over-descriptive" (the first draft was 700 words) to "way too under-descriptive" (which resulted in a story about as bland as a story about kidnapping, mental torture, and murder could possibly be).

I wasn't sure how what I came up with would be received. I felt like I'd made something that at the very least wasn't embarrassing, but I was worried over whether or not the implied previous content locked people out of the story (and also whether or not I was being overly vague). I guess it worked, but I still feel like it could have flowed better.

In the end, the Vogons rolled to a third consecutive victorious week, and that's what matters.

On an only partially related note, I'd like to share my condolences with fellow contestant Jake Elliott, who lost his uncle in an accident over the week. Stay strong.

Spookymilk Survivor VIII: I Said “Lunch”, Not “Launch”

The challenge this week was to create a short story where a character hears something wrong, and it creates lasting consequences. No other intro is really necessary.

Joanne is a girl unlike any I’ve met. She’s smart and clever, with a taste in music that almost perfectly matches mine. There’s just one problem.
Whereas a normal (one might say ‘sane’) couple might have a couple subtle coded hints to get messages to their other in a crowded room, Jo has over a hundred – all context sensitive. When she first told me, I thought she was kidding. She wasn’t . She just likes getting needlessly specific about things. Instead saying something like “oh, it’s getting late” if she’s ready to leave the party, she’ll say something like “so, tell me, what do you think about the ramifications of last year’s trade treaty?”. That doesn’t just mean “it’s time to go” it means “it’s time to go, but I need to go to the store on the way home.” Needless to say, no boyfriend has ever managed to keep it all straight.

The incident took place at a party a couple of months after we started dating. She had informed me that there were a couple of people there that she hated, and that she wouldn’t want to stay very late. She gave me a cheat sheet for conversational words I’d want to pick up on when she was ready to leave, and we left.

After about an hour, Jo was talking to some guy named Randy, while I exchanged boring pleasantries with some guy who would not shut up about the space program. As he went on about trajectories and polymers, I found my mind wandering back to the day Jo and I first met. It began to dawn on me that she had been talking about a locust plague in south Australia, which I found odd at the time. Taking out my cheat sheet, I flipped to the “insect-related oddities” section. to my horror, I found that that was the code for “the guy I’m talking to seems nice enough, but he bores me to tears, let’s make out in the park.” So that’s why her boyfriend suddenly got an allergic reaction to the clam dip he’d been cramming down his gullet for the past three hours.

I was pissed, but she deserved a chance to explain herself. I began to contemplate how I was going to breach the subject when I realized she was staring right at me, looking annoyed, talking about the French revolution. Shit! What did that mean? I checked my pocket for the cheat sheet, but couldn’t find it. How had I lost it that quickly. I panicked for a couple moments before remembering her saying that there was no subject that interested her less than the French revolution, she would only use that in an extreme situation. Springing into action, I tackled Randy and sucker-punched him. Then, tossing Jo over my shoulder, I sprinted out of the door as a party full of shocked people stared dumbly at me.

“Put me down, you psychopath!” screamed Jo.
“I got it right, didn’t I? French revolution and all? Was Randy an ex or something?”
“I was talking about the french art revolution, not the insipid one with the peasants and the guillotines!”
“Wasn’t that one supposed to be for if you had a cold and needed some cough syrup?”
“Only if the person I was talking to was female… why can’t anyone ever learn that part?”
“I assume we’re breaking up?”
“Hell no, you’re the only one that’s ever tried to figure out my system. For future reference, though, next time I call you. Over to introduce you to my brother, it would probably be best if you didn’t try to kill him.”

K: A fun concept, although just about anyone would misunderstand this crazy wench, so that sort of took away from this one. I would have liked more dialogue and less explanation here (well, you’d have to work the explanation INTO the dialogue) because these characters are tons of fun and I wanted to spend more time with them.

B: This is just over the top silly, making every single spoken word a misunderstanding. The wackiness is amusing, but I still feel it bites off more than it can chew. Even in this world the author created, I still don’t find the conclusion believable.

Ah, Beau, that’s because it’s not believable. The concept for this one was fun (though, again, not my first choice – more on that in a second), but a bit ridiculous. I actually chuckled more at the concept than any particular bit that I ended up coming up with. That coupled with the fact that the entire thing ended up being written on my phone when I realized that I wasn’t going to get to a computer in time to hammer it out in style, and I guess I should be happy that it wasn’t savaged. Oh well. I’m on a cold streak, time to step it up, I guess.

I had originally planned on doing a story of a sentient robot assassin who kills the wrong woman and self-lobotomizes because of the guilt. I really liked how the story flowed except for one problem; it was exceedingly difficult to wedge the misunderstanding portion in without being either nonsensical (how does a robot get it wrong? If an order was vague, he’d ask for confirmation) or WAY over-wordy (I had one explanation for the mix-up that ended up being three paragraphs of exposition. It was awful.) In the end, I went with something a little more light-hearted. I was 98% sure it wouldn’t win immunity, but what can you do?

Tanya was a nonsub, so it didn’t matter, anyway. The days of DSK have been tragically cut short.

Spookymilk Survivor VIII:

I don't really have any preface this week. We lost a team member last week, and another nonsub bit the dust.

The challenge this week was to write a short story about a person in a comic book universe who has a truly useless superpower. The person could use that superpower to their advantage, or be messily destroyed when the superpower proves just as useless as it seems.

Here's what I came up with:

…Meanwhile, on the other side of town….

With Ironfist and The Human Torpedo chasing wild geese in the warehouse district, their arch-nemesis Riboflavin has broken into the vault of the Central Trust. Having incapacitated the guards and deactivated the security system, it seems nothing can stop the madman. The villain’s victory assured, he doesn’t even notice the man in tan spandex approaching the vault.

“Halt!”

“Ah! Holy cow, you scared me. What are you doing here? And what on earth are you wearing?”

“I’m here to stop you, evildoer, and the particulars of my super suit are none of your business!”

“Charming. Before I brutally murder you, what’s your name?”

“I am Tapioca!”

“Come again?”

“I am…”

“I heard you the first time. What would motivate you to come down here and get slaughtered? Do you even have a super power?”

“I can conjure pudding from thin air!”

…

“Did you hear what I said?”

“How much pudding?”

“About 4 or 5 servings”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all I’ll need”

“Enough of this, I’ve got to get moving so….glurk…gak”

“I didn’t say where I’d be conjuring the pudding, did I?”

Riboflavin’s response is drowned out as his lungs begin to fill with precisely 5 servings of chocolate pudding. His horrified expression is etched permanently onto his face, with a small brown river dribbling out of his nose. The grateful (if slightly disturbed) security guards ask Tapioca how they will contact him if they need him in the future.

“Wherever there is crime that can be stopped with 4 or 5 servings of pudding, that’s where I’ll be.”

K: This had me at “Riboflavin” and I giggled throughout. Another useless superpower comes through (sure, it was more of a “kryptonite” thing than a clever use of something stupid, but it’s all good). Just about every line of spoken dialogue was chuckle-worthy, but I have to single out the specificity of “4 or 5 servings” as my favorite. This gets four or five points. You know what? 5.

B: Is it supposed to be “man in tan spandex?” Either way, this made me laugh out loud. This entry is made by “4 or 5 servings.” If it’s just “4 servings” this is half as funny. 5

 

I really liked the idea of this challenge, but it stumped me like none other (except for maybe the Battle of the Mimes last year). I came up with dozens of awful ideas, one semi-great idea (that I came up with while slightly drunk that I couldn't remember the particulars of the next morning), and absolutely nothing that stuck. With one hour left til deadline, I had written absolutely nothing. At that point, I did the sensible thing. I panicked.

One constant I'd had all week (other than an idea of the "British League of IndePendent Supers" which I thankfully discarded) was the idea that the less than useful ability was going to be making some seemingly benign substance appear out of thin air. It was all I had to go on, and I was eating a pudding cup at the time, so I went with it. The dialog came pretty naturally, though I was worried that basing the entire gag around the dialog might be a little risky (an unfounded fear, apparently). The much heralded "4 or 5 servings" line just seemed to flow with the rest of the dialog and seemed funny, so in it went.

The hardest part was naming everyone. I liked Riboflavin as a villain name (what kind of power, if any, does that guy have? It certainly isn't the ability to breathe pudding.) The A-list heroes were the hardest to name, as most of the good, or even cliché ones are already taken in some form or other. By the time I got to naming the hero, I only had about 30 minutes left, and I hadn't even proofread anything yet - hence the unimaginative, but oddly fitting "Tapioca". In all, from concept to finished product, it came off in about 30 minutes. After a quick proofread to make sure I hadn't made any glaring grammar errors, I sent it off. Sometimes I'll agonize over certain sections and re-think things for way too long; I didn't have that luxury here, and I think that actually worked for the best in this case.

Again, a nonsub on our team means we'll be sending someone careening out of the game, but after that, it looks like we might actually have ourselves a game. The game really starts on Tuesday.

Spookymilk Survivor VIII: Letter of Resignation

In each of the first eight weeks of Spookymilk Survivor Eight (the ocho) there have been two constants: non-submitters and the removal from the game of someone who did not fly under the DARK STOMRY KNIGHTS flag*. This week, one of those safe comfortable certainties was put asunder. Which one? Read on.

*it might just be me, but I think the DSK flag would probably just be this picture that I just now found randomly on Google images.

Over the top and brilliant – JUST LIKE DSK

This week, the challenge was to take a public figure, either real or fictional (no politics, and I can’t put into words how grateful I was that this clause was added), and write a resignation letter for that person. A straight to-the-point example might be Derek Jeter retiring from the Yankees to go play rugby with his college friends. A less to-the-point example might be Beethoven’s eardrums retiring from their duties as purveyors of sound. Either would work, both have potential in the constraints of the challenge.

Here’s what I came up with:

My Esteemed Colleauges,

I regret to inform you that at the conclusion of the “Blood, Death, Mayhem, and Blood” tour, I will be terminating my duties as the rhythm guitarist of the band Bludgeoned By Lobsters. I feel that starting with our last album, “Fecal Death Squirrel”, our music has become too pandering and watered down, and I wish to take my talents in a new artistic direction. I will always treasure the time I shared with Bludgeoned By Lobsters, and hope that no hard feelings arise from this decision.

With all regards,

Ronald Floyd Jenkins IV

You may notice something pretty early (something other than the fact that I misspelled “colleagues”, which I somehow missed upon proofread – embarrassing). We’ll get to that shortly. Here’s the judges’ critiques:

K: Did this exist before, or is this fictional on the part of our contestant? That wasn’t the intention, and I therefore never even considered the possibility. That one makes this stand out, but so do the solid gags. I love the name of the tour and the idea that this is “pandering.” 4

B: This is great. Using “blood” twice in the title of the tour is perfect. Also, I love that “Fecal Death Squirrel” is their watered down album. 4

Ah, there we have it. I kind of cheated. There were a couple reasons for that, but primary among them was the fact that the first words I had in my head when I read this challenge (which I sucked at last year… I mean, GAWD) were “Blugeoned By Lobsters”. After I laughed to myself for five minutes, I decided that BBL was an idea that I was simply not going to give up on.

The problematic thing about “Bludgeoned By Lobsters” is that there are limited ways in which such a phrase can be used. I decided that BBL was a Grindcore band (because really, how could they not be?) and that they were “selling out” by toning it back. Fecal Death Squirrel is the start of their watering down, and from the only thing left to do was name the tour (the second “Blood” was a last-second addition that I added before sending). I was worried that the entry was a little out of bounds (sad as it makes me, there is no band called Bludgeoned By Lobsters), and I wasn’t sure if the judges would have been okay with that. It looks like they were. I suppose I could have written a short story about BBL and uploaded it to a random fanfic site, at which point the band would have gone from being fictional to being… well… still fictional. Luckily, that turned out to be unnecessary.

Sadly, there were still nonsubs. Even more sadly, both nonsubs came from DSK, so we have to evict one. Assuming my team doesn’t come after me for unforeseeable reasons, I’m excited to see next week’s challenge.

Spookymilk Survivor VIII: Punch To a Quick End

Last week went pretty well. This week, the challenge was to write as short a complete story (or at least something that told a complete part of a complete story) as possible. To complicate matters, the story had to fit within two bookending sentences (helpfully provided by the judges).

Better get used to these bars, kid.
Your stunned silence is very reassuring.

It didn't matter which one started the story, and which finished so long as the story was bookended by those two sentences. In addition to the standard "x points out of 5" scale, additional points would be added or taken away based on the length of the piece in comparison to the other entrants. The shortest three (again, assuming the entrant told a self-contained story) would be given extra points. The longest three would lose points.

Was I able to top last week's top notch score and grab an almost impossible '7'? Read on...

My entry:

“Better get used to these bars, kid.”

The words snapped me back to reality as I stood in front of the dessert table at my wedding reception. The man’s voice went on, “after all, you did marry into a Lutheran family. Goes with the territory”. I faked a chuckle.

My new wife approached. “What a whirlwind of a day. Is there anything I can get for you? Have you met my family?”

I wanted to say something but nothing was coming. I couldn’t do anything but stare dumbly at those damned brownies. I guess I had a lifetime of those to look forward to, at least. Lisa gave me a quizzical look before playfully jabbing me with her finger, “Your stunned silence is very reassuring.”

Kelly and Beau's Critiques

K: I do like the sad internal monologues of people in regret. Always interesting stuff. I assume this one will be on the long side, but it’s good. 4

B: Cute. I’m not much into denomination jokes. I am very into brownies. 3

For fun, here's the breakdown of what everyone's "bars" were:

Dessert: 4
Prison or Other Cage: 3
Musical Notation: 2
Drinking Establishment: 2
Handlebars: 1
Generic Metal Bars: 1

So first things first, I guess I completely failed in my intention to pick something others might not. I figured more people would go for either the prison or drinking establishment routes. My first thought was to go a more comedic route, with the bars tasting terrible or something of the like. I'm glad I didn't do that, as a couple of the other entrants went in that direction, and were more successful than I probably would have been.

I'm not entirely certain where I got the idea of a semi-regretful groom staring at a dessert table. I've never actually seen one of the stereotypical Lutheran "Potlucks" at a wedding reception - certainly not mine, though I did marry into a Lutheran family (more on that in a moment). The "Lutheran family" joke was actually meant to lampoon those who DO subscribe to denominational humor (I really dislike humor of that ilk), so I had the speaker of that joke be a nameless, faceless annoyance. It looks like that didn't come across quite the way I wanted for it to.

The "stunned silence" line simply would not fit into the story, no matter what I tried. I still don't like the look of it. It's not a phrase that is very easy to shoehorn into "normal" dialogue. It sounds sarcastic, but stiltedly so. The bride is playfully ribbing the protagonist, and it doesn't quite look right, but I don't it's so bad that it throws everything off.

I didn't even bother with length. I know that length was precisely half the challenge, but I couldn't find a way to tell the story I wanted to tell without having three characters, and it's quite difficult to have three characters and describe them in only a couple throwaway sentences. As it turns out, I think I made the right call on disregarding the length (but only barely so, a couple more sentences and I would've lost points). I think the idea of "short as possible" stories is a good one, and the challenge on whole is solid, but most of the shortest ones read as jumbled and somewhat static (and received low "story" scores as a result), and most of the longest ones ended up being the best. In the end everyone who submitted was within a point and a half of each other. That probably says something about the level playing field almost as much as it does about the challenge, but I digress.

More nonsubs this week, so of course, it only mattered insomuch as it's always fun to read the submissions. Maybe next week we'll get a full quorum and things will get interesting.

Spookymilk Survivor VIII: Create-a-Challenge Grab Bag

I didn't update this last week because it was the create-a-challenge, and I never have anything very interesting for those. In fact, the one I made this time around is one I would explicitly not want to actually do - it scored appropriately poorly.


This week, though, I was a little more excited. Spooky and Beau chose seven challenges out of those submitted last week (including mine, for reasons that likely involve brevity), and instructed us to pick whichever one struck our fancy.


This was actually the first time during this Survivor that I felt solid inspiration. I ended up choosing Drew's challenge, involving these three seemingly unrelated pictures.









Here's what I came up with:

I suppose I am asleep right now. After all, that is how the Lotus Eater works. The machine keeps you in a kind of lucid sleep limbo as the technicians view static images from your memory on the screen. I am not in control of anything; I am simply a passive observer. I don’t even know what they’re looking for.

They didn’t seem to be interested in the first few images, and passed them by pretty quickly. Soon, they found one that must have at least piqued their curiosity. I’m not sure why. It was a memory from my college days. My brother, his girlfriend, and I were drinking on the roof of my parents’ farmhouse. The image is wrong, though… the ground is covering everything up to the top window. It’s almost as if they zoomed in on what they were interested in, ignoring everything else, or maybe the technology isn’t as perfect as they’d like – it’s hard to say. Either way, they saw what they wanted to see and moved on without much delay.

The second image they stopped on seemed to have caught a bit more of their attention. The company I work for had me take a look at some geological anomalies out by the old fairgrounds. The project seemed routine, so I brought my fiancée and her friend along (I will note that geological phenomena do not capture the interest of the average American woman). I didn’t expect to find anything particularly damning, and I didn’t. I gave my superiors my findings, and they placed a research team on the project. That’s not strange, it happens all the time. What is strange is that this image is wrong, too. The bulge in the ground was nowhere near as pronounced as this one is. Something like this would’ve garnered a lot more attention.

While they might not have had much interest in any of the other images, they’re clearly keen on this last one. They’ve had it up for what feels like hours. I don’t even remember being in a room that looks like this. Knowing how images in this mindspace get altered, I’m trying my best to think of how this one could have been changed. I think I vaguely recognize my fiancée in the middle, and the person on the right could be my brother’s ex-girlfriend, but they never knew each other, and I’ve seen then together. The person on the left is obscured, and doesn’t look familiar, anyway. In fact, the whole memory is so unclear that it doesn’t seem like any information could be gleaned from it at all. I’ve been trying to piece together how these last three images could be connected, and I’ve gotten nothing. Unless…..

Oh, God…

I don’t think that they’re going to be waking me up anytime soon….

And here's what the judges said:

K: What an awesome idea this is. So unexpected, and so clever. It rambles a bit, but that fits the character. 5

B: All right, this is just great storytelling. I so want to know what happens next…no, scratch that. I want to know what happened before. 5

Obviously, I'm pretty pleased with the results this time around. I knew right when I saw the challenge that I wanted to go with the pictures (I'm kind of surprised no one else did, instead opting to go in the rather tired "advice column" direction). The idea of an unnamed narrator being stuck in a sort of limbo of lucid dreaming came right away. The idea of people using a machine to try to extract information from damaged memories came very shortly after. Now the only problem was to write it in a concise manner.

I didn't actually succeed in writing what I had in mind, the middle picture provided me with a problem* - how could I move the story forward without getting overly wordy or even worse, give too much away? This story relied on a vague sense of dread in order to function properly. Revealing too much about the protagonist or what the mysterious people were after - especially before the third act - would undermine everything.

* The second act has always been the hardest to write in any fiction I've ever written. In fact, I'm not actually sure I've ever completed one to my liking.

The third picture was suppose to be the easiest. The picture itself is good, but given the right framing device, could feel ominous. The problem was, how was I going to tie everything together when I didn't even know myself how everything tied together? The answer - don't tell anyone how it ties together - could be viewed as kind of a cop-out. You really don't learn anything about the main character other than the fact that he's just realized something awful and is in very deep trouble by the end of the story. I actually like it better that way. Over analyzing dread removes a lot of the bite to the feeling. A monster in dim light is more frightening than both a monster in full light and a monster in no light.

I actually had a full paragraph opening this as a sort of explanation of what was happening to the narrator, and how the world operated. I excised this and went for the more slimlined version seen in the final version. I like that decision. I've actually thought about writing a full length short story about this scenario, but I'm unsure of whether or not it the feeling that this short piece evoked could possibly be drawn out to that extent. I guess we'll see.

Bottom line, there were nonsubs again this week, so it didn't matter. DARK STORMY KNIGHTS remains triumphant, and Nick Punto is sitting somewhere in St. Louis, eating a plate full of bacon and laughing maniacally.

Spookymilk Survivor VIII: Dewey Defeats Truman

So, after rolling to a better-than-deserved-but-still-kind-of-disappointing third place in last year's Spookymilk Survivor creative writing contest, I'm back for another round with a new team. My team, DARK STORMY KNIGHTS, seems pretty solid, and through the first four weeks, we've yet to lose a member.

For week five, the challenge was "Dewey Defeats Truman". Write a short article based on a real life news item with a drastically different outcome.

This was my submission:

May 7, 1937

The Zeppelin Hindenburg arrived in Lakehurst, New Jersey this morning, carrying 97 passengers. Though the trip itself may be considered a marginal success, the dullness of the trip left most of the patrons wanting.

“The trip itself was an awful bore” stated one of the travelers, “I mean, I know airships are safer than those awful fixed wing aircraft, but I do wish they were a little more exciting.”

The disappointing reviews, in conjunction with the financial failure of the movie Dirigible, seem certain to spell the end of the golden age of airships.

These were the judges' critiques (scores are out of 5)

K: I don’t say this often, but this one isn’t wordy enough. I love this concept – the idea that a story would be written for no other reason than to relate a story of people being bored – but a longer story would have made it just keep getting funnier, I think. 4

B: You know, there’s nothing really funny about this one. But it’s written well. And it’s short, which is a nice touch in itself, what with the Hindenburg now being a back page story. The movie tie-in is pretty sweet, although the fact it was released six years prior hurts the irony of its mention a bit. Still, nice work. 4

Overall Score: 4

First thing, I knew to avoid politics. While I enjoy discussing politics occasionally, I knew that there would be lots of political sketches (though I didn't know how many there really would be). I knew that it would be unwise to go toe-to-toe with some of the writers on a political level. That's fair enough. Besides, while it's fairly easy to write a light-hearted political spoof, it's damned tough to write well-written political satire.

The next thing I found out is that just about anything I could come up with for this challenge would bear resemblance to a certain mock news site already in existence. While I do enjoy the Onion, it tends to be formulaic, and if I wasn't careful, it would be too easy to fall into the standard Onion formula.

Once I started writing, I found that just about everything that was appearing on the screen sucked. I wrote a Grammy write-up in which Katy Perry won best album, causing Russell Brand to rush the stage and start mooning the audience, only for an angry Justin Bieber fan (Usher, as it was) to rush the stage in turn, take the Grammy out of Ms. Perry's hands and bludgeon Mr. Brand to death with it. Not good. Awful, in fact. Everything I was writing was too complicated, or too jokey, too pointlessly edgy, or just flat out DUMB.

Originally the Hindenburg piece that I went with was going to have two more paragraphs (which would have included another eyewitness account and a mini-editorial by the 'reporter'). I cut them out because they didn't make anything any funnier or better, only longer. The fact that Dirigible came out in 1931 was unfortunate, and I’m not sure if it was a financial failure or not, it was just an interesting piece of trivia, and I liked the idea that someone was deciding that airships were screwed because a movie about them did poorly. I liked how my piece - short as it was - was written. It looked like a little blurb that could have been tucked away on the fourth page. It was a little bit of a gamble (my decision to go the short route on the Battle of the Mimes challenge last year very nearly ended with my elimination*), but I decided that it was the best I could up with without sprawling into writing bloat.

* Then again no matter what length, mine would have been the worst entry that week anyway, it was a hell of a challenge, and I'd suggest anyone who hasn't seen it go check it out - very much worth a read.

I guess it didn't matter one way or the other. There were two people who didn't even submit anything, so they'll be on the block (which is disappointing, there's been a lot of great work already this contest, and none of it's meant much of anything because of the nonsubs). I'll keep this up to date, detailing my time in the contest a little better than I did last year. If nothing else, it'll be a nice time-capsule of where my headspace was at when I was writing this.