Good movie, by the way. If you enjoyed The Incredibles, this is one of those rare sequels that picks up from where the first one left off and actually improves on it. If you’re overloaded on Marvel superhero movies, then you really need to watch Incredibles 2, to remind yourself that superhero movies can actually still be fun once in a while.
Right. This column is supposed to be about the new Friday Challenge. Back on topic, then.
Being capable of learning from experience, we’ve decided to change things up a bit this time out. First off, the challenge this time is to write a funny flash-fiction story—longer, this time; you can go up to 500 words if you must, although you should probably try to keep it under 250, and if you can do it in 100 words, that’s fantastic—about something Thanksgiving holiday related.*
Not horror. Not intentionally badly written. It doesn’t have to have any fantastic or science-fictiony aspects, though I’d be interested to see if you can do it. It doesn’t even have to be specific to the Thanksgiving Day holiday that’s coming up in about two weeks. What we’re looking for this time out is a funny flash-fiction story, about something that’s at least tangentially related to the ideas of traveling home for the holidays, getting together for a big family dinner—or what the Hell, camping out at the mall to be the first one through the doors on Black Friday.
Maybe it’s your story about the time you promised to make everyone a wonderful pumpkin pie—when you’d actually never baked a pie before in your life. Maybe it’s your story about the time Dad misread the instructions for the Nesco and accidentally cremated the turkey, and you wound up having Indian carry-out instead. Maybe...
You get the idea.
Now, here’s the big difference from the Lovecraft challenge. This time out, I want you to start thinking about ideas for a story now, but we will not begin accepting entries until Friday, November 16. This time, the submission window is from Friday, November 16, to midnight on Wednesday, 21 (with the possibility of snowdogging in late entries on Thursday morning). On Friday, November 23, we will post all the entries we received, and you will have one week to read and comment on the entries, before we announce the winner on Friday, November 30.
Important point: remember, you need not enter the challenge in order to comment on the entries submitted and to vote for your favorite.As before, submit your entry as a comment attached to the November 16 post, or by email to submissions @ rampantloonmedia (dot) com. Also as before, the author of the winning entry gets a $25 Amazon gift card. (I suppose, if we keep doing this, we should come up with some sort of suitably official-looking award certificate to hang on your wall.)
Sound like fun? Then ready, set.... Get thinking!
* For our non-U.S. friends: Thanksgiving Day is an American national holiday on which we commemorate the fact that one particular group of early religious refugees, newly arrived here from Great Britain, did not starve to death, thanks to the timely humanitarian intervention of the local indigenous peoples, who completely failed to recognize a colonizing alien invasion beachhead when they saw it.
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