This month’s Commuter Challenge returns to sonnets. But sonnets as they stand are much too free-form, so for a proper challenge, all the words in your sonnet must begin with the same letter of the alphabet. The choice of which letter to use is up to you.
Create a piece of artwork no larger than one inch on a side. There’s no restriction as to subject matter or medium, with the exception that you must draw everything by hand yourself. Using computer hardware to shrink things down is strictly forbidden.
If you prefer sculpture to drawing, feel free to submit a cubic-inch-sized work of art instead.
The beginning of a new year is traditionally a time for fresh starts, so we’ve decided to make the first Commuter Challenge of 2010 “Amnesty Month”. For this month, return to a previous Commuter Challenge for which you failed to make a submission, and make one now. Whether it was because you didn’t finish before the deadline, or had a great idea but just never made the time to follow up on it, or because you just didn’t have any great ideas until you saw everyone else’s submissions (after which you were kicking yourself) — it doesn’t matter. This is your opportunity to redress the challenge of your choice.
Include with your submission a short essay explaining why you didn’t finish it before, and what’s changed since then. If the truth is too boring to fill even a short essay, feel free to embellish.
Create a dust jacket for one of your favorite books. No restriction on the kind of book (fiction, nonfiction, other) or the type of illustration, other than it be created by you.
Write a set of three double dactyls. (Consult Wikipedia for a concise explanation of the constraints of the double dactyl.) You can pick anyone and anything for your subjects. However, what you do not get to choose are the single-word lines. Instead, you must use the words in this list:
Use each one only once per poem.
This month’s challenge is: Sonnetfight!
Throughout the month of October, we will follow the challenges on songfight.org, but instead of recording songs we’ll be writing sonnets.
If you’re unfamiliar with songfight, how it works is simple. Periodically a song title is posted to the website. During the next week anyone can compose, record, and submit an original song with the given title. All the submissions are then posted to the website, and voted on to determine the winner.
We’ll be skipping over the voting part of the process, but otherwise we’ll be following their lead. When a new title and deadline is posted, you have that much time to submit a sonnet with the given title. All entries will be posted to our website immediately following the deadline.
Sonnet Fights
The Commuter Challenge awakes from hibernation with a simple task: Create a crossword puzzle. There are no requirements other than to conform to the standard requirements of (American) crossword puzzles. (Consult http://barelybad.com/xwdrulesreal.htm for an overview of the requirements.)
Edit: The Commuter Challenge for this month was cancelled after the fact due to lack of participation. The Commuter Challenges went into hibernation from January to August 2009, to be resumed in September.
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Draw up some New Year’s resolutions. Tell us what they are, and why you’ve chosen them. Go into as much detail as you’d like to. For a change of pace, we’re not requiring a specific format for your submission: you can use prose or poetry as best fits your needs.
Produce the shopping list (or to-do list, or Post-it note, or something of that nature) that you found on the refrigerator or desk of Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, Aristotle, or someone of that ilk.
Create one to three minutes of spooky music. There are no requirements as to genre, vocals, instruments, or anything of its contents. Just make it spooky, and at least sixty seconds long.
For September we’re going to spend the month immersed in process of writing really short stories, a genre popularly known as flash fiction. However, the typical flash fiction word limit is between 750 and 1000 words, and that’s just too expansive for us.
The challenge is: Write a story between 250 and 300 words long, as per Micro Fiction. Then write another story between 50 and 55 words long, as per The World’s Shortest Stories. Finally, write a story using exactly six words, as per Not Quite What I Was Planning.
Subject matter is up to you. Your three stories can be loosely related, but not as a way to get around word limits: Each story should stand on its own.