New Works
The following pieces were created in response to our most recent Writer’s Group challenges.
JULY WRITER’S CHALLENGE 7.19.2010
SUPERHERO OBITS
Create an unlikely Super Hero and write his/ her obituary in 5-7 lines. Include their amazing accomplishments, personal struggles, and reason for their untimely death.
Ms. Flatula Airbiscuit, age 26, of Atlanta, GA, passed away on July 18, 2011. An astonishing woman, Flatula is most commonly known for her defeat of Hard-Boiled, the Eggstraordinary supervillan who was responsible for scrambling the brains of thousands in Europe, and for the single-handed defeat of the Diamond Crewciferous, headed by Dr. Bok Choy—a group of criminals responsible for the theft of millions of dollars in diamonds. Flatula Airbiscuit has no survivors and was never married, a status commonly attributed to her superpower, a malady that prevented people from tolerating her company for extended periods of time. Because there were no witnesses to the event and the coroner was unable to scrape together enough of Flatula’s remains for a full autopsy, the conclusion reached by investigators was that Flatula’s decision to vacation in Trinidad’s mud volcanoes was a particularly poor choice, considering her condition and well-known proclivity for smoking marijuana. Although Flatula is mourned the world over, a statue has been raised in Piparo, Trinidad, where it is said that following the massive explosion, her odor caused such ardor, that the people insisted upon the erection of a monument labeled with her catch phrase, “Pull My Finger.” A ceremony honoring her works will be held statue-side on Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 10 AM EST. In lieu of flowers, please make donations to The Bean-O Foundation for Wind Breakers, 2525 Let One Rip Blvd, Atlanta, GA 30328. -CRYSTAL RAST
Gatherers Mourn Invisible man A memorial was held on Saturday for the Invisible Man, who is missing and presumed dead. Hundreds turned out despite the chilly weather to view the body, which may or may not have been lying in state at Morton’s Funeral Home. Wonder Woman, visibly shaken, was distraught and kept repeating to her fellows mourners that the deceased “looked so much like himself.” The two had a prolonged love affair which became public after it was found that she was not a chronic masturbator, but was in fact in a relationship with the transparent crime fighter. The Invisible Man because famous as a super hero amid controversy when he may or may not have caught and guided Pan Am flight 273 safely to the ground after it suffered structural failure on a flight to Zurich in August of 1973. Although the pilot of that aircraft still insists that it was he who landed the crippled plane, Invisible won national acclaim for saving all 247 passengers. The Invisible Man had withdrawn from the public eye in recent years since the highly publicized trial in which he was acquitted of pushing famed tightrope walker Jason “The Flying Wambini” Wambini to his death in June of 2004. Witnesses at the circus testified that they didn’t see anyone pushing Wambini as he walked a tightrope in the big top in Cleveland, OH. Because no one was seen pushing Wambini, the Invisible Man was the only suspect. He was acquitted for lack of material evidence. No one had seen Invisible in the last seven years and so, by technical standards, he was declared legally dead last month. His body may or may not have been interned at Westside Cemetery immediately following the service. - JIM HEMAUER
IRONY MAN… Ruralpolitan City mourns the loss of beloved superhero IRONY MAN, who was tragically crushed last week when an iron girder fell on him during the ribbon cutting ceremony for the first Ruralpolitan City Hospital. Irony Man was known for his many good works, including putting Magneto in behind bars, banishing The Penguin to Antarctica, and rehabilitating The Joker through a combination of clown college and volunteering with children. From his humble beginnings as a newspaper editor’s dyslexic son to his humiliating turn on Wheel of Fortune, Irony Man was known for humor in the face of adversity and irrational rage in the face of good fortune. As an organ donor, Irony Man was expected to save many lives, but the recipients of his blood and organs were all tragically lost due to iron poisoning and radioactivity from his super-human blood. It was also discovered that Irony Man was actually a woman. – DELILAH DAWSON
SurvivorGuy killed at coffee shop
Hikers, explorers and naturalists around the world mourn the loss of SurvivorGuy who died today in a Los Angeles Starbucks. After saving countless buried skiers from frozen avalanche graves, nearly-scalped hikers from cannibalistic attacks in the Amazon River Basin, and after dragging ashore his 250th consecutive life raft lost at sea, SurvivorGuy finally met his end. He taught the brave survivors of the world how to survive a night in a crocodile infested Louisiana Swamp. He trained American paratroopers how to survive a night alone in the parched Mohave desert. And he helped the world realize that drinking your own urine, given the proper time and place can be, in fact, socially acceptable. However he found his life in today’s Metropolis to be a bit awkward. He never understood paying bills, he was always locked out of his apartment, and he rode his pet Wildebeast everywhere he went. But when he tried to mix his own urine into a Low fat Carmel Machiato this past Tuesday morning, at the Starbucks on Hollywood and Vine, during the breakfast rush, he was immediately shot onsite by the Starbucks security guard on the grounds of potential terrorist activity. Clearly surviving the modern cityscape was not his cup of tea (or coffee)… Or whatever that stuff was in his cup. -SETH DECKER
JUNE WRITER’S CHALLENGE 6.21.2011
COMMERCIAL COPY: Write a three line ad or commercial copy for the product below…explaining what the product is, what it does, who will buy it, what celebrity might endorse it, what will it cost, what comes free with purchase etc. Have fun. Product: The Blue Gangle
The Blue Gangle: The new-fangled Blue Gangle was designed by the Quangle Wangle for wrangling gangs of tangles in dangling bangs.
The Quangle Wangle swears on the star-spangled banner that his angled Blue Gangle will detangle bang tangles from any angle without mangling.
Warning: Avoid pangs of entanglement by eagle, pangolin, anglerfish, Anglophile, or gangs of vainglorious ninjas, as such entanglements can cause painful tangles and hanging strangles.
DELILAH DAWSON
Why does Hugh Hefner never seem to have any problems pleasing the ladies?
Because Blue Gangle WORKS!
When they’re blue, or if it dangles, YOU NEED BLUE GANGLE!
JIM HEMAUER
Blue Gangle
(Bar scene girl checking her phone, trying to shove it into a too small pocket of her skirt to go dance, gets frustrated.)
VO: You want to stay connected, but you don’t always want to be connected to your phone so Sony/Ericsson brings you the the Blue Gangle.
(Close up product shot)
VO: Stylish, discreet and practical the Blue Gangle wirelessly alerts you to a call or message when you are up to 10 meters away from your phone.
(Girl dancing with Blue Gangle)
VO: Shockproof and waterproof Blue Gangle lets you safely leave your phone at the bar
(shows a girl leaving her purse with a bartender to go dance)
VO: in your locker
(shows a guy leaving his phone in a locker to go work out)
VO: on the deck
(shows a girl leaving phone on pool deck to go swim)
VO: in your pants
(shows a phone turn on in a pants pocket followed by a pair of bare feet walking over and getting the phone)
VO: and not worry about missing a phone call again.
(Graphic) ERICKA AXELLSON
MAY WRITER’S CHALLENGE 5.17.2011
ONE LINER: Write a ten sentence story that begins with the following line:
‘That day on the hill, many things went wrong.’
That day on the hill, many things went wrong. If a picnic could be made in hell, that one would have come complete with a forked tail and a fire extinguisher. Of course, most of the problems rested firmly with Fawn, who had forgotten to wear her lucky scarf and accidentally wore a perfume that made George’s sneeze constantly. Of course, his clueless but retaliatory insistence on bringing a cheese plate to woo a lactose intolerant lass was also hard to forgive. Conversation stumbled along in epileptic fits and starts, from Fawn’s innocent question about his mother’s recent case of armadillo-spread leprosy to George’s insistence that the only women who kept Persian cats were frigid. It didn’t help that they had neglected to bring beverages and found a snake near the creek at the bottom of the hill, causing Fawn to spend the rest of the picnic standing in the grass with her arms crossed, her impractical, pointy heels stuck stubbornly in the grass like polka-dotted tent pegs and her pepper spray held in a death grip.
“Do you like to read?” George asked, desperate to find some sort of common ground.
“I’m dyslexic,” Fern snapped, mumbling, “As my eHarmony profile clearly states.”
The following silence was so uncomfortable that when the angry grizzly barreled out of the woods, they were both grateful for a believable reason to run away screaming. -DELILAH DAWSON
Writer’s Challenge MARCH 3/15/2011
“THIS IS THE WORLD” Suppose you’ve been commissioned to write a description of the world as you know it, using only TEN sentences. This description will be placed in a Time Capsule that will be opened 500 years from today. What would you write?
CRYSTAL RAST
Today is March 21st of 2010—Year of the Metal Tiger, a year according to Chinese astrology that is a year of crisis and unpredictability, political and social upheaval. We’ve only been in the Year of the Tiger for five weeks now, yet a battle has already begun between the United States aligned with the European Union and Libya, and an earthquake followed by a tsunami has devastated Japan. The tiger is wreaking havoc with our already unstable world, and that havoc is broadcast to billions of people by Metal—cabling, wires, computers, cellular phones. Truly we have begun the year of the Metal Tiger.
Ours is a world that erupts daily with technological advances rendering the previous quarter’s advances obsolete—or worse, unfashionable. This world is ruled by the whims of spoiled, undisciplined, whiny teenagers and twenty-somethings which wouldn’t be so bad, if they were ever actually presented in a real conversation. To our detriment, communication in the economically strongest nations is limited to unstructured writing—in some bastardized, scaled-down version of teenage argot, known simply as texting.
And to you, humans in the future, should you find this time capsule ironically filled with my written lamentations, I would like to offer you an apology—it’s our generation that began the genetic evolution that eventually rendered your lips and mouth as useless as pinky toes and wisdom teeth were in ours. I’m sorry you’ll never know what a heartening event it is to share a conversation with someone, or even more poignantly, to share a simple kiss with a person you love. But, on the positive side, typing must be so much easier with all those extra fingers you’ve grown.
JIM HEMAUER
Our world, people will tell you, is diseased. It is polluted and corrupt, and peopled with brutal dictators, greedy politicians, and fifth-column, useful idiots that can’t tell the first two apart. People will wail and whine about how we have ravaged the landscape and put asunder all the beauty that the earth possessed before we, as a species, crawled out of evolution’s primordial ooze to wreak our havoc. But they value the life of a hungry dog over that of a hungry child. And would march for peace but never get around to meeting their next door neighbor. They will urge conservation but purchase a new SUV. But the funny thing is that these people, humanity in general, have been saying and doing these same types of things for the last 5,000 years, and they have convinced themselves that it is true. They’re blind to the reality that the world is, and has always been, a glorious place filled with wonders both natural and manmade. And the earth, indifferent, will continue on, with or without us, as we humans sit in air-conditioned comfort, sipping exotic blends of imported coffee beneath prints of master’s paintings perusing a universe of information on notebook computers more powerful than the Apollo space program, and complain.
JEAN MACAULAY
Mostly it is contrast and contradiction.
Fragrant, fecund pastures lie heavy with dew in the gray citrus sun of the early morning. Arid, brown deserts come to a standstill, baked into lethargy. Overstuffed plates are heaved into the trash. Children scrounge barefoot in a dump, whittled to skin and bone. Dictators, rebels and terrorists mount holy wars and destroy villages of “others.” Martyrs stand between strangers and death. Mothers run harried children from sports to music to tutoring. Old men sit alone by a window.
Beautiful and wretched, kind and brutal, ancient and new, ours and no one’s, the world leaves us breathless, dumb, awed.
SETH DECKER
This is a world of Hyper communication and Mega Media stimulation where human beings Idolize their Screens. Everywhere you look hand held devices lead us around encouraging us to broadcast our private lives hourly onto the large and small Screens of others. The Screens reveal our personal photographs, letters, movies, current locations, and even the most mundane thoughts for everyone to access, applaud and criticize. The Screens have us mesmerized by their games, social opportunities, and endless access. They tell us where to drive, who to fall in love with, and how much money to withdraw from our bank account. Privacy has been lost, and self glorification has been amplified to the point where there is so much noise and chatter blasting from our beloved Screens, that we dream of unplugging our minds, and retreating into the woods for a moment of peace. But then amongst the trees, we all discover that our entire lives exist only on Screens, and we can’t even remember the day or the time, or a loved one’s phone number without them. The message is clear, if you choose to disobey your Screen, your ‘personal profile’ can and will be deleted. So if you truly want to know every detail about every living person on planet Earth in the year of 2011, don’t worry, you can witness everything; human beings at our best and our worst. All you have to do is log in.
ERICKA AXELSSON
I don’t think much will be left of the world we occupy today 500 years from now. Today’s world is too disposable. Today I can go visit buildings 3000 years old built by the Mayans over the course of many lifetimes, but my house built in less than a month will no longer be in existence in a generation or two. The tools of our trades are impermanent, outdated and quickly disposed of. Our entertainments are transitory, and our greatest achievements are worn down to nothing in the course of a news cycle. Even trees planted today are not the majestic trees of primordial forests, but spindly things that will be cut down to clear the way for new. The only thing that seems permeant is our trash, but we have even taken steps to eliminate that. Our generation seems to have lost the drive to make a permanent mark on this world. Our noblest effort is put to leaving nothing behind. If you open this time capsule to learn what happened to the missing first decade of the millennia do not think of it as a dark age, but as an age where men forgot how to dream great dreams.
DELILAH DAWSON
1. We don’t know our neighbors, but we know thousands of strangers with whom we speak in 140-character blurbs in which we misspell things on purpose to be funneh.
2. Whether we live in hovels or mansions, we never have enough stuff, and we don’t have enough room for the stuff we have, but people will come to our homes and tell us where to put all our stuff if we will give them money.
3. Teenagers who can’t sing get more attention than well-trained, middle-aged artistic geniuses in their prime.
4. Vampires, vampires, vampires!
5. The staples of the American diet are coffee, sugar, salt, fat, boxed goods, Twinkies, alcohol, and white gunk from a cow’s nipples, because these days, vegetables are more likely to cause cancer or illness.
6. Most people go to school 8 hours a day so that they can get a job going into a cell for 8 hours a day where they get no exercise and never see the sun, instead focusing on sending packets of electrical information back and forth, never producing anything tangible, and then they’re always surprised to find that they’re unhappy and unfulfilled.
7. After spending all day inside, sitting in a box and staring at a glowing box, most people go home to sit in a different box and stare at a different glowing box.
8. No matter who you are, what color your skin is, who you love, where you grew up, or how you’re made, you can always seek and find greatness and success if you’re willing to work hard enough.
9. There’s this chick called Lady Ga-Ga, and… um… nevermind.
10. Despite living lives that make very little sense, most people consider themselves happy and are full of hope for the future, a time when we all assume we’ll be ruled by robots, aliens, or zombies.
That’s all for now. Check back in each month for many more New Works.
