Pick a painting, drawing, photo, poem, story, novel, song, film/video, or anything else that is in the public domain. If it is a poem, story, novel, or song, create one or more illustrations (or photo, or video) for it. If it is an image or film/video, write a poem, short story or song for which that image will be the illustration.
For this month, create one or more pages from an alphabet book. There are many different kinds of alphabet books, and you are encouraged to look inside a few on amazon.com or a local bookstore for ideas. The most traditional type is to illustrate each letter with a single object, such as an animal, flower, or food. Other alphabet books tell a story, along the lines of the traditional “A was an apple pie”. Still others are meant to be read by adults instead of children. Your page (or pages) can contain images, text, poetry, or all of the above, or maybe something else entirely.
For this month, we’re turning back to illustration. The challenge is to create a depiction of machinery. No other explicit constraint is offered, other than that it be two-dimensional. Use the medium of your choice: ink, paint, pencil, crayon, needlepoint sampler, Photoshop, ASCII graphics … whatever you enjoy working in most.
Create a drink, and provide both the recipie and your fabricated account of the history/origin of the drink (unless you have actually made an original drink and have a good anecdote about its creation, in which case the history doesn’t need to be falsified). Look into the histories of drinks such as the Gibson, Zombie and the Gin and Tonic for examples and inspiration.
Be as fanciful as you like. Whether or not you attempt to mix or taste your creation is up to you; the drink does not have to be palatable. The ingredients don’t even have to exist. You may make up different ingredients and liquers if you like - consider the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
Create a paradelle. More specifically, the most cogent paradelle you can.
What is a paradelle? A paradelle is an unusual poetic form invented in the 1990s by Billy Collins. It was intended as a joke (the name is a combination of “villanelle” and “parody”). He presented a paradelle in a collection of his poetry, entitled “Paradelle for Susan”, and accompanied by the following footnote:
The paradelle is one of the more demanding French fixed forms, first appearing in the langue d’oc love poetry of the eleventh century. It is a poem of four six-line stanzas in which the first and second lines, as well as the third and fourth lines of the first three stanzas, must be identical. The fifth and sixth lines, which traditionally resolve these stanzas, must use all the words from the preceding lines and only those words. Similarly, the final stanza must use every word from all the preceding stanzas and only these words.
Design one or more cards. Create and submit a new design for a playing card, or Tarot card, or any kind of card. For example, you can draw your own version/interpretation of the King of Hearts. If you want to do more, re-design the Queen of Hearts and Jack of Hearts, too, or even more cards. Or get extra creative and design an entirely new facecard, like the Bishop, and create designs for one or more suits. Or make a new suit, like the ankh or fleur de lis, and design cards for the suit. Use whatever medium you like: ink on paper, watercolors, photoshop, collage, pencil on bar napkin, embroidery, crayons, ASCII graphics, anything.
Submit a caption for each drawing in the New Yorker Caption Contest throughout the month of December. This will involve writing maybe one sentence (or sentence fragment) per week, so make it good. Each should be brilliant and original; shoot to make yours the winning entry, or at least one the top three chosen out of the thousands upon thousands of submissions each week. Submit online each week, and also forward the text of your submission for posting on the Commuter Challenge website.
New cartoons are posted each Monday. You have until the following Sunday to submit a caption. The first contest for this Commuter Challenge will open December 4th.
Hint: don’t go for the easiest gag - if a seemingly good caption immediately jumps to your brain, ask yourself whether or not it’s likely that dozens or hundreds of others had the same thought. If so, then you should probably consider trying something different.
Write a ghost story suitable for reciting at a ghost-story-reciting-type-situation: say, around a campfire with a flashlight held under your chin, or in the drawing room after a formal dinner while trying to top each others’ gruesome anecdotes over snifters of cognac, or late at night during a pyjama/slumber party with all your pre-teen girlfriends. So it should be more suitable for narration than for reading on the page (or at least as suitable), and it should be of an appropriate length. Shoot for anywhere from 500 to 2500 words. Try not to let the reading time go for more than ten minutes or so; a comfortable reading speed is around 150 words per minute.
Write a response, sequel, retelling, or companion poem to some famous poem. It should be in a similar format, and ideally it should be about the same length, unless you’re responding to something like Faust or Beowulf. (In this case, though, it might be preferable just to respond to a famous passage, rather than the whole poem.) Use your own judgement as to what constitutes “famous”.
Write a sonnet about superconductors. Fourteen lines, strict meter, and please choose any accepted rhyme scheme (there are several possibilities that way). Don’t know anything about superconductors? Neither do I, but that just makes it more interesting and challenging. Think this challenge is too easy for you, and you can rattle off such a sonnet in a half hour? Then take the month to craft a really really really good sonnet about superconductors.