Discussion thread -- October 2015 75-word Writing Challenge

[Ursa major]

Many thanks for the vote, Bowler.

 

[Dan Jones]

Thanks Littlestar! A 75-word stalwart, eh? I'll take that any day of the week

 

[Mr Orange]

thanks a lot for the mention @Cat's Cradle and the shortlistings @Venusian Broon and @Starbeast.

i really wasn't expecting much this month, so was very pleasantly surprised to get a vote from @LittleStar . thanks heaps and i'm glad you like it!

 

[Vaz]

Many thanks for the mention Mr Broon, much appreciated.

Favourites & Vote*

Ursa
Chrispy
Alice
Victoria
Cat's
Drof
Brat
HazelRah

 

[johnnyjet]

After much deliberation, my Long List, Short List and **** Favorite ****

Brocas's - Glen
Love Letters - Victoria Silverwolf
**** Vive Quercus robur – Kerrybuchanan ****
Gernusian Octopoids Only Get Limited, Error-ridden Translation - Mr Orange
Linguistic - chrispenycate
The Ministry of Language and Linguistics - DG Jones
First Born - Saharren
Love Found, Fades and Fails - Tim James
We One - Phyrebrat
The Last Enemy - TitaniumTi
Origins - willwallace
History, redux: Chapter 1 - StilLearning
The Carillon - Mad Alice
The problem with multiple AI’s and interstellar pirating on a shoestring - Venusian Broon
Foolish Things - TheDustyZebra
Little-read Writing Hood; or Words in Play-Ursa major

 

[willwallace]

A short short list-

Victoria Silverwolf-Love Letters
Cat's Cradle-The Single-Personality Mutant/s in a World of Sequentially-Integrated-Multiple-Personality Individuals
Chrispenycate-Linguistic
Culhwch-Cheers to The Universal Language

I feel these four stories are all brilliant in their own unique way, and it is very difficult to choose a single winner for a vote. But, choose we must.
And so, I finally settled on Culhwch. After all, his story included beer!!

 

[HazelRah]

First of all, Thankyou to Parson, CC and LittleStar for your lovely mentions. And super dooper thanks to Vaz for the vote! - I can't quite believe it

This has been the most difficult month for me in deciding who to vote for. I know others have mentioned it too, but I think the standard for this one has really been something special.

Honourable mentions to:
Kerrybuchanan
Ratsy
Jo Zebedee
TitaniumTi
WillWallace
HareBrain

Super honourable mentions to:
Phyrabat
Ashlene B Watts
Victoria Silverwolf

And then I was genuinely stuck between these three...
DG Jones
LittleStar
Mr Orange
They are all such different stories with very different takes on the theme. In the end, it was by less than an invisible hair that I decided *Mr Orange* deserved the vote. It's not often I come across something so funny and written so naturally

But a great month to everyone. I know many of these stories will stay with me long after the challenge has passed...

 

[Dan Jones]

It might be the end of harvest season now, but that didn't stop a bumper crop of stories from sprouting up this month! And now, it's time to identify the cream of the crop (I never knew you could grow cream...).

My Long List
Glen - A touching and wistful paean to what is, and what was, and what has been lost. The flourish of one word - succumbing - made this a deeply affecting story.
Victoria - Love Letters. Prose poetry is notoriously difficult, but this is a wonderful, impressionistic air to the elements themselves, and the ways in which they speak to one another, far beyond our human understanding.
Littlestar - Piece Taut to a Whorled At Wore. I couldn't put my finger on why I liked this, but it had a kind of abstract je ne sais quai that is starting to typify your work on these challenges. In the end I decided it didn't actually mean much at all, but was simply words at play, and for that reason alone it deserves a mention.
Drof - One Small Misstep. Yeah, that ending is coming a mile off, but it didn't stop it from plastering a soppy grin all over my boat race. The only thing that would have improved it would have been the captain doing a Clay Davies style, "Aw, sheeeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiit" at the end. But one mustn't be greedy about these things.
Kerry - another lovely piece of preternatural prose poetry; a Tolkienesque glimpse into the secret lives and language of trees. Who is the silent assassin, I wonder? I reckon it's Alan Titchmarsh. My hero!
Mr Orange - you're churning out comedy gold at the moment. We shall have to start calling you Oranjeboom!

!!!!!

Jo - I loved this. Absurd and sincere, daft as a box of monkeys and as beautiful as a shaft of sunlight through the trees, all at the same time. At once it's a love story not only between two characters, but the love stories we cultivate with our own, private languages. Skills, Jo.
Phyrebrat - gosh, this reminds me of something, and I can't for the life of me remember what, but the idea of entire existences' worth of knowledge, emotion, and experience being condensed and explained by a single word is a powerful one, and effectively conveys the humble limits of our own understanding. The repetition of "one" is like a mantra, a chant, approaching Zen, approaching totality. More than a whiff of TS Eliot about this. Maybe that's what I'm thinking of.
Cul - it's a wonderful thing that you can wind up in any bar on any spit n' sawdust planet in this crazy ol' galaxy and be sure that, whether the bug next to you's got three heads or a massive proboscis, you'll both find something to chew the fat over once you get a pint of the good stuff in front of you. Unless you're French, in which case it'd be a demi-litre, the Philistines. Let's just hope the Anglophiles make First Contact, eh?
Harebrain - It's Götterdämerung. But with extra clorms. You clever sausage.
Ursa - like a one-man punning juggernaut drowning in a vat of his own boiling hot syntax, Ursa clorms as many double sausages into this magnificent bag of nonsense as is humanly probable, delivering goolygang after goolygang of dripping wet word pudding with all the ganache of Russ Abbott (for it is he again!) in a Thesaurus-eating contest.

In the end it was a brutal four-way verbal punch-up between Jo, Victoria, Phyre and Ursa. Jo was a whisker away... but in the end I had to give it to Ursa, the naughty chap.

 

[Ursa major]

Many thanks for the vote, DGJ.

 

[Droflet]

Thanks for the mentions Vas and DG.

 

[TitaniumTi]

Thank you for mentions and listings, Victoria, Hex, Droflet, Juliana, Cat's Cradle, Starbeast, Johnnyjet and HazelRah.

 

[Mr Orange]

crikey, another vote... thanks a lot @HazelRah! a great way to start an overcast and cold day. thanks for the long listing @johnnyjet and and, ah, thanks, i guess for the oranjebooming, @DG Jones ...

 

[Dan Jones]

@HazelRah, thanks for putting me in your top three

 

[chrispenycate]

All right, my shortlist was finally trimmed down to:- Culhwch, DG Jones, Kerrybuchanan, mosaix and Ursa major. Which took a lot of trimming. And I think - no, I've decided. It's going to be Mosaix.

Thanks to:- Glen, johnnyjet, Starbeast and willwallace, for the mentions; I hadn't been expecting that much for what is frankly catterel (like doggerel but less faithful)

And, obviously, a huge thank you for Venusian Broon, who went so far as to vote for it.

 

[Bowler1]

Right then Chrispy, with the power of Castle Grey Skull... ahem... spread sheets at a pinch, can we speed up this voting which has been terribly slow.

You name 'em, and I'll shoot 'em.

Bowler1 scurries off to fetch more RAY GUNS muttering to himself - this month, please let me shoot them this month!

 

[Droflet]

Hey Bowler can I go first. I like ray guns. Bugger, I've already voted.

 

[Mr Orange]

 

[Ursa major]

Let's hope things don't escalate by someone challenging Bowler1 by asking, "You and whose air force?"

 

[Mr Orange]

Spoiler: rayguns underneath

you and whose airforce, bowler?

 

[chrispenycate]

According to my little list, there are:- A. Fare Wells, Ashleyne. B. Watts, Culhwch, cyprus7, HareBrain, Kerrybuchanan, Luiglin, Mad Alice, mosaix, Mr Orange, ratsy, Robert Mackay, Saharren, StilLearning, The Judge, TheDustyZebra, Tim James, Travis Woodward, and, of course Ursa Major who have submitted, but not yet voted. And nobody who hasn't submitted has yet voted. And I forgot to thank Vaz for the mention.