This month’s challenge will centre around the image below (source). It’s entitled Fish room, and it’s one of the postcards featuring the wonderful art of Nicoletta Ceccoli.

  Gold Medal Winner: 

Quaeritata

  Gold Medal Winner: 

iconoclast

Susan has five letters, drab only four.  Sue had three and expressed
both nicely.  She used the typical short form of her name, went to the
typical school, dropped out of the typical college and married the man
everyone expected her to.  She was having a typical life, and it was
killing her by inches.

She had a recurring dream:  she was a
goldfish, with fewer complications to her life even if it seemed less
interesting.  She had a goldfish attention span, and every time she
swam around the bowl, the tacky little plastic castle seemed a little
different, the gravel seemed a different shade.

*** Edit 09/08/2008: apparently no-one found the time to participate in the July Challenge. The Challenge for August will be up by the end of the weekend. ***

This month’s challenge will be open to both prose and poetry: the requirements have been set up to allow for either type of entry. Style, theme and subject matter are pretty much for you to decide.

If you would like to participate, you can submit your entry by clicking the “Create new Challenge Entry” link below.

Fair warning: Even I’m not sure what this is. I don’t know where it came from or where it’s going, it just made a lot of ripples.

A fisherman awoke in the water at the shore. Crawling from the surf, he struggled to find a familiar landmark, something to tell him where he was. Finding none, he sat on the pebbled beach for a moment before realizing that this was probably not a good idea. The sun was setting, and he needed to find shelter or build a fire if he wanted to live. The sky was clear, there was no sign of the storm.

>> EDIT: this challenge has been closed <<

This month’s challenge will be open to both prose and poetry: the requirements have been set up to allow for either type of entry. If you decide to enter a poem cycle, please limit yourself to five poems at the most. Style, theme and subject matter are pretty much for you to decide.

  Gold Medal Winner: 

iconoclast

  Gold Medal Winner: 

BethanyM

Thank you all for participating in the Lone Shoe Exercise. Thorough consideration has produced the following results

Resenera — Gold medal
Iconoclast — Silver medal
Spastica — Bronze medal

The stories submitted by these three were thought to best comply with the constraints set out. Individual evaluations will be mailed to the contestants.

All these contests and exercises with their medals might feel daunting. They do to me, and I’m not even taking part in most of them. In the earliest days of this community, someone (Spastica?) broached the idea that we spend a given amount of text describing a chair. It’s the oldest bit of Literalminded Lore so far. (Ten years from now, anyone aspiring to the status of LM newbie wil be required to do just that as part of their admission tests.) We’ve all pondered the possibilities of this one. We’ve all imagined what it would be like to sit down and try to write the blasted thing.

Long before she bought her first pair of fishnets and rolled down the waistband on her skirts to raise the hemline, there was a nakedness in her eyes like swollen blackberries on a leaf-barren vine.

She looked for it in other people, touching strangers’ arms in passing to lure a glance and thumbing the brows over young eyes, soggy with whiskey, until one night there was a wicked dance between the conversationalists in her head that lasted well into morning.

Petroglyph came up with a great suggestion in Forums: http://www.literalminded.com/discussion-forums/-writing/cellphone-novels , and this is going to be the basis for our March Contest. The rules are as follows:
-Submit a complete “novel” using 200 characters or less. Characters include letters, spaces, and punctuation marks.
-Post your entries here as a reply in this thread by Friday, March 21st.
-Vote one time for top 3 entries.
-Winners will be announced on Monday, March 24th, and posted in our April 2008 newsletter.
Good luck!