An Original Fic Podfic
A while ago I did a bit of moonlighting in the original fic world over at DA and took part in The Gauntlet, which consisted of nine challenges of increasing difficulty to be completed, in order, during September 2017:
1. ZOMBIES OF THE VICTORIAN AGE (1000 words or less.) Make clear to the reader without explicitly stating the year or place that the story is, indeed, taking place in England under Queen Victoria.
2. ORIGINAL ORIGIN (700 words or less.) Choose one feature or phenomenon of the world around us that you will explain the origin of in a fable-like tale or legend. Include something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.
3. MINER DETAILS (1500 words or less.) Spin a tale of harrowing danger and drama occurring in a mine. Pick (haha) a four-syllable word you will use eight times, and a eight-syllable word you'll use four times over the course of your story. Also, all of your characters are dinosaurs.
4. THE ADVENTURES OF PERSPECTIVE MAN (Triplet word counts, only: 555, 777,...) In your story, it is revealed that the protagonist was the monster all the time. Somehow incorporate each colour of the rainbow and all names in Disney's 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'.
5. A JOURNEY OF DYSCOVERY. (707 words, exactly.) In this dystopian story, your main character(s) tread beyond the borders of their home and find it is not as they were told it was. One of your characters is not human, you must at least provide three instances of slang you invented for the occasion and none of your sentences starts with a vowel.
6. BREV UP (6 words, exactly.) Write a six-word-story about something abrupt. None of your words may be of equal length, and you must include the word 'so'.
7. NOT TO BE (300 words or more.) From a robot's perspective, write a space horror story without using any form of the verb 'to be'.
8. ONCE UPON AN A-B-C (12 lines, minimum.) Write a modern-day fairy tale that is progressively lipogrammatic: your first line will exclude one specific letter of the alphabet, your second line one extra, and so on.
9. FIRST SHALT THOU TAKE OUT THE HOLY PIN... (555 words, exactly.) Write, in Elizabethan English, a Fantasy adventure in second person, simple future tense, put to rhyme. Make sure your first sentence is pangrammatic, i.o.w. uses each letter of the alphabet at least once. This story must only be two sentences long. Include three different types of cured meats and a Monty Python quote, as well.
No-one will be surprised to hear that this kind of thing really appealed to me, and I eventually came third in the contest. But I think only two of the pieces I produced truly worked as stories, rather than just as solutions to puzzles. They were Memento Mori for the first challenge and How the Joke Got Its Punchline for the second. I tidied up Memento Mori and sold it to JayHenge as usual, and in November, How the Joke Got Its Punchline got a Daily Deviation on DA. This is a daily feature that is technically promoted to the whole site (but you do have to choose to go and look at the page of DDs). It tends to mean that you meet a few new people, and someone who saw my story asked if they could do a reading on their YouTube channel The Saturday Storytellers.
The recording is now ready and can be found here!
The person who runs The Saturday Storytellers is Rowan Oakley (saturdaystorytellers on DA) but the narrator on this occasion is HorseygirlE.
I love the use of music and sound effects, and the narrator gives it their all with their use of individual character voices. I’m really rather taken with the whole thing-it put such a big smile on my face today.
Original post on Dreamwidth - there are
comments there.
1. ZOMBIES OF THE VICTORIAN AGE (1000 words or less.) Make clear to the reader without explicitly stating the year or place that the story is, indeed, taking place in England under Queen Victoria.
2. ORIGINAL ORIGIN (700 words or less.) Choose one feature or phenomenon of the world around us that you will explain the origin of in a fable-like tale or legend. Include something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.
3. MINER DETAILS (1500 words or less.) Spin a tale of harrowing danger and drama occurring in a mine. Pick (haha) a four-syllable word you will use eight times, and a eight-syllable word you'll use four times over the course of your story. Also, all of your characters are dinosaurs.
4. THE ADVENTURES OF PERSPECTIVE MAN (Triplet word counts, only: 555, 777,...) In your story, it is revealed that the protagonist was the monster all the time. Somehow incorporate each colour of the rainbow and all names in Disney's 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'.
5. A JOURNEY OF DYSCOVERY. (707 words, exactly.) In this dystopian story, your main character(s) tread beyond the borders of their home and find it is not as they were told it was. One of your characters is not human, you must at least provide three instances of slang you invented for the occasion and none of your sentences starts with a vowel.
6. BREV UP (6 words, exactly.) Write a six-word-story about something abrupt. None of your words may be of equal length, and you must include the word 'so'.
7. NOT TO BE (300 words or more.) From a robot's perspective, write a space horror story without using any form of the verb 'to be'.
8. ONCE UPON AN A-B-C (12 lines, minimum.) Write a modern-day fairy tale that is progressively lipogrammatic: your first line will exclude one specific letter of the alphabet, your second line one extra, and so on.
9. FIRST SHALT THOU TAKE OUT THE HOLY PIN... (555 words, exactly.) Write, in Elizabethan English, a Fantasy adventure in second person, simple future tense, put to rhyme. Make sure your first sentence is pangrammatic, i.o.w. uses each letter of the alphabet at least once. This story must only be two sentences long. Include three different types of cured meats and a Monty Python quote, as well.
No-one will be surprised to hear that this kind of thing really appealed to me, and I eventually came third in the contest. But I think only two of the pieces I produced truly worked as stories, rather than just as solutions to puzzles. They were Memento Mori for the first challenge and How the Joke Got Its Punchline for the second. I tidied up Memento Mori and sold it to JayHenge as usual, and in November, How the Joke Got Its Punchline got a Daily Deviation on DA. This is a daily feature that is technically promoted to the whole site (but you do have to choose to go and look at the page of DDs). It tends to mean that you meet a few new people, and someone who saw my story asked if they could do a reading on their YouTube channel The Saturday Storytellers.
The recording is now ready and can be found here!
The person who runs The Saturday Storytellers is Rowan Oakley (saturdaystorytellers on DA) but the narrator on this occasion is HorseygirlE.
I love the use of music and sound effects, and the narrator gives it their all with their use of individual character voices. I’m really rather taken with the whole thing-it put such a big smile on my face today.
Original post on Dreamwidth - there are
comments there.