Ficlets

The Challengers have been busy and we have a bumper crop o’ challenges to share today. And here we go!

• An Awesome Dream – The League of Awesomeness challenge, by your pal and mine, THX 0477. My favorite thing about him is he came up with the League of Awesomeness on his own and had never heard of The Show With Ze Frank (really, go watch – some of the funniest video ever recorded).
• Mundane Moments Made Magnificent – I love the idea behind this one. There are magnificent things we do every day – why not revel in them for a minute? For example, I’ve been flying a lot lately (in planes), and it’s amazing that I can get from DC to California in less than a day. It used to take months and most people never made it.
• Forced Rhyming – Write a poem, but it has to rhyme!! I do that, like, all the time.
• What is Beautiful? – A great challenge. Reminds me of A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. If you haven’t read it, and want to find out what beautiful prose is, go find a copy. It is beautiful, the words, the descriptions, etc. I’m planning posting an excerpt as a challenge on the blog here at some point (I loaned out my copy, so I have to wait for it to come back).
• Melia’s Scary Challenge – Whatever you do, make it scary.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Annie Dillard that always kicks me in the gut. If there’s something you want to do that you’re not doing, something that’s nagging at the base of your skull that you can’t find the time for, print this out and tape it to your fridge, or to your bathroom mirror (emphasis mine).

Thomas Merton wrote, “There is always a temptation to diddle around in the comtemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.

The quote I meant to share is about beauty, but I’ll get to that some other time, I guess.

Happy writing, friends, now go raise some Cain!