Friday, February 29, 2008

Friday Challenge: And the winner is...

Holy Moly, talk about having an embarrassment of riches! We had some really great entries in the 2/22/08 Friday Challenge, and I'm somewhere between impressed and stunned by the quality of the work you folks have produced. Addressing the entries in no particular order:

WaterBoy - (link) What can I say but, Dude, it's like, whoa, and then like, whoa!, and then it's like —

Sorry, I'll settle down now. Very nice; very creative. I especially like the idea that it's evil actions in our world that open the portal to that Other World where the Nasties live. Very cool.

Claymore - (link 1 | link 2 | link 3) Very nice setup in parts 1 and 2, but then you take that dizzying shift into part 3 — which by itself would be a good idea, but I feel cheated. I still want to know what happened to the old guy with the metal detector and the old lady with the leaf broach.

Al - The New Guy (link) Very well-written; very inventive. You've got some good skills and great ideas, and while this one isn't a winner, I definitely want to see more from you.

rycamor - (link) It would need some de-Tolkienization and you're right, the ending is rushed and needs work, but you actually have a really good pitch for a contemporary fantasy / magical realism novel here. I'd like to see you develop it further.

Vidad - (link) A giant, invisible, evil sea turtle? Nazgul riding black Segways? I love it. Much like rycamor's entry, I think yours is about one rewrite away from being sellable to a paying market, and I think you should go for it.

Henry Vogel - (link) You really need to get together with Vidad. This one is note-for-note perfect, except that it needs to be a YouTube video, not a print piece. (Hmm? I wonder where we can find a Peter Jackson lookalike? And a really good wide-angle lens...)

Sean - (link) Utterly daft; terrifically creative; insanely original. This would have been the winner, except that —

KTown - (link) — I then read KTown's entry, and just lost it. So, wanting a sanity check on my judgment, I printed out all the entries, taking care to hide the writer's names, and ran them by Karen.

When she hit the part where the hobbits sneak into Paris Hilton's post-Oscar party by waylaying an all-midget Kiss tribute band and taking their places, she lost it, too.

Ergo, the winner of this week's Friday Challenge, and the highly coveted whatever the heck it is behind Door #2, is KTown. After some discussion we also decided to award an Honorable Mention to Sean, so KTown and Sean, come on down and claim your prizes!

Now, as for the 2/29/08 Friday Challenge

Actually, the idea I had in mind seems pretty lame in light of the quality of this week's entries, so I'm going to go back, rethink it some more, and post it tomorrow.

Ciao,
~brb