Writing Challenges

I belong to a wonderfully quirky online community known as Absolute Write. There's all kinds of subsections on their forums, one of them being the "Share Your Work" area, which is a passworded (sort of) part of the forums set up so that our critiqued work can't be Googled and spammers can't come rain on our parade. My SFF buddies and I give each other monthly challenges just to stretch those creative writing muscles, and I've been "hosting" the challenge for several months now. Usually we have four challenge topics a month, sometimes five if there are extra Mondays in the calendar, and people are welcome to write about one or all of the topics.

So, rather than re-post all of these, I'll just gather them up in a comprehensive list for your viewing pleasure. Or torture. But you're going to read them anyway, aren't you? Keep nodding. Remember that ninja bunny I told you about? Yeah, she's still waiting back there.

(FYI, all links go to the Absolute Write forums, and the public pw is "vista")


The beginning... Sept '07

.SF&F September Challenge Topics (original thread by Koobie)
Participant list (compiled by me!)

My entries: Combat Magic, Evil Overlords, Cybernetics, Airships

October '07

SF&F October Challenge Topics (original thread by Azraelsbane)
Participant list (compiled by me!)

My entries: Forbidden Love, Red Shirts, Secret Weapons, Slavery, Halloween

November '07

Postponed due to NaNoWriMo (link)

December '07

SF&F December Challenge Topics (first one hosted by me!)
Participant list (compiled by me!)

My entries: Royalty in Disguise, Assassins

January '08

SF&F January Challenge Topics (hosted by me, participants included)

My entries: Escape, Gods

February '08

SF&F February Challenge Topics (hosted by me, participants included)

My entries: Twins, Ghosts

March '08

SFF March Challenge Topics (hosted by me, participants included)

My entries: None Very busy and unmotivated that month.

April '08

SFF April Challenge Topics (hosted by me, participants included)

My entries: Microscopic Dragons

May '08

SFF May Challenge Topics (hosted by me, participants included)

My entries: Mothers

June '08

SFF June Challenge Topics (hosted by me, participants included)

My entries: None :(

July '08

SFF July Challenge Topics (hosted by me, participants included)

My entries: Anthropomorphism

August '08

SFF August Challenge Topics (hosted by me, participants included)

My entries: none yet!

So there you have it! Those are all of my publicly posted entries. I also hosted a small self-challenge within my WoW guild where I asked members for topics, but I didn't keep up with it well and there are still a lot of outstanding requests. Since those are in private forums I can't link them. Well, I could link them, but only people with members access there would be able to see anything.

Aren't these wonderful bits of procrastination? Yes, I thought so. You may bow to the mistress of time-wasting. And if that isn't impressive enough, you should've seen how long it took me to make this post!

Today's ponder:

"If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?"


~Sass~