Long-time friends of
STUPEFYING STORIES know that it began life as an offshoot of
The Friday Challenge, a sort of writing workshop -slash- writing contest that ran from 2009 to 2013 (and was itself in turn a spinoff from
The Ranting Room, a blog that ran from 2005 to 2009). The very first, print-only edition of
STUPEFYING STORIES was in fact a compendium of Friday Challenge contest winners, and all modesty aside, some of these stories are really quite remarkable, especially considering that they were all written
quickly, as entries in contests.
The mechanics of the Friday Challenge were this: each week (on Friday, of course), I would spot you, the readers, an idea -- it might be the beginning of a story, or a scientific factoid, or just a few choice words -- and whoever wanted to participate in the challenge had
one week to bash out and submit a short story inspired by that idea. Then, on the next Friday, we'd post all the entries received, post the
next challenge, and open up the virtual phone lines for the debates, critiques, arguments, and voting that led to our selecting the best of the lot. Whereupon the winner would receive a token prize, and we'd all get going on the next week's challenge.
The original
Friday Challenge was, quite honestly, a heck of a lot of fun, and it drew together an online community that became the nucleus of the original
STUPEFYING STORIES crew. While I no longer have the time to run a contest every week, and the file-sharing site we used for sharing submissions without releasing them into the wild is long since defunct, lately I've begun to think, maybe, just one more time...
So here's the challenge.
True story: I once knew a guy who was such a cheap dirtbag, when he was going out on a date, he'd stop by the cemetery to steal fresh flowers.
I'd heard this about him before, but didn't believe it, until one day when I was riding in his car with him and he suddenly pulled over to the curb, jumped out, and ran into a graveyard, to return with a fresh bouquet. "I got a date tonight," he explained. "Nothing gets you into a girl's pants on the first date faster than showing up with fresh flowers."
"But, but," I sputtered, "you
stole them! From a
grave!"
He shrugged. "Yeah, well, they're dead. They don't care."
¤ ¤ ¤
Ah. But what if they
do care?
That's your challenge. Write a
short (1,500 words max.) story that answers the question: what if the dead do care
very much about what happens to the flowers on their graves?
The (pardon the expression) deadline for this challenge is midnight Central time, Friday, October 27. (Snowdog rules apply.) Send your entry to submissions@rampantloonmedia.com, and include 10/13/17 Friday Challenge somewhere in your subject line or cover letter. Since we no longer have the ability to share files semi-privately for at-large discussion, we will convene a crackerjack panel of experts to review the entries and select a winner. The winning story will be published on Halloween; if we receive too many good entries to select a clear winner, we may publish the top [some number] and award a special prize to the winner, as determined by reader poll. (I've got a polling widget on this site now. I'm dying for an excuse to use it.)
Does this all seem clear enough? Then, you have two weeks. Ready, set --
Get writing!
