Monthly Challenges: Ideas

[Miriya]

Well, with NaNoWriMo 2009 having come and gone, I think some of us can agree that we need other challenges to keep us writing throughout the year. And hey, that's what the Monthly Challenges section is for, right? The thing is, we need ideas for the challenges. And that is what this thread is for.

Idea: Novel Mashups

Okay, so the idea here is sort-of like with 'Pride, Prejudice and Zombies', except a wee bit different. What was done with PPZ was the addition of the element of zombies. Here, we're mashing two complete novels together and at the least, summarizing the idea.

There are two choices here:

a) A full summary

or

b) A short summary and an excerpt of... as-yet undetermined length.

All that I would ask is that the novels the participants mash together have links to summaries for people who might not have read them, if that is available. If no decent summary is available, then try your best to give a decent blurb yourself.

Another thought is that in addition to the mash-up, there might be a small list of plot elements that writers need to choose from for their challenge piece.

Thoughts? Crits? Um... Additions/tweakings to this idea? I'd love to hear it.

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Idea: Random Team Collaborations.

Now, I'm a fan of collaborative writing. I love brainstorming with others. I think it'd be cool to pick names out of a hat and put them together and maybe lay out some requirements/rules for the challenge.

Alternatively, you could pick a partner, but that's not nearly as fun as not knowing who you might end up writing with.

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So, have at it. You have an idea, no matter how modest or epic, post it here. It should give us some thoughts as to what to give you guys to evoke thought and awesome writing times!

-Miriya

[Crows]

I love both of these ideas. I would love to do one of them for a January challenge. I think, going into next year, we should just plan to take November and December off. With NaNo and the holidays/NaNo recovery, it might be more prudent in general. This month has flown by. But enough about that.

While I like both of those ideas a lot, I think I'd - myself - like to try the team collab first and brainstorm on the novel mashup idea a little more (maybe because I'm braindead and I can't think of any books I've read right now >.<). How about, for the January topic, I start a thread in the Challenges forum for participants to put their names in. I'm also going to go stir up my friends down here and see if anyone else wants to participate, so we can get an idea of how many names we're throwing into the hat when the first rolls around.

Should we have a topic? Should we have a general target piece (are we writing short stories, novel concepts)? Or should it be totally free-for-all do you think?

[Crows]

Since no one has objected, I'm going to go ahead and get the ball rolling on the collab thing