Well, at least it still works better than CoComment.
Despite that, two brave souls managed to work through the difficulties and submit entries in response to the 7/3/09 Friday Challenge. They are:
Al, "July 4, 2049: The Days"
The Bandit, "Hillside History Lesson"
As always, even if you haven't submitted an entry this week—even if you never submit an entry in any week—you're invited to read, comment on, and vote for your favorite. Don't be shy about leaving feedback on the authors' blogs, either. Writers thrive on knowing that someone out there is actually reading their words. The winner will be announced on Sunday.
And now for this week's challenge, I turn the microphone over to Al:
Benedict Arnold, Hero
In the early days of the Christian church, there was an offshoot Gnostic branch that felt the mainstream church had everything... backwards.
In their version, the deity of the Old Testament used power stolen from God to create the world and humans as his playthings. He banned them from learning (the Tree of Knowledge) and from achieving immortality for themselves (the Tree of Life). The True God sent a messenger to Adam and Eve to open their eyes to what this malign deity had done to them, and the messenger came in the form of a snake. (In many ancient cultures snakes were a symbol of immortality, because a snake is "reborn" when it sheds its skin.) Adam and Eve ate from one tree, but were caught before they could eat from the other, and as punishment, the malign deity saddled them with a new stack of curses and rules.
Years later, the True God sent the same messenger, this time in the form of a man, to help people open their eyes. The deity that created this world had so much sway over the people that he managed to get the new messenger nailed to a tree for opposing him.
Obviously, this interpretation has not been widely accepted...
But the concept makes for an interesting twist on a familiar story. Other writers have used the same "everything you know is wrong" concept as the basis for their stories. Mary Stewart's The Wicked Day featured Mordred as the lead character. Fred Saberhagen's Dracula Tapes and Frankenstein Files each retold the originals with a very different point of view. More recently Gregory Maguire's Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West has found a large audience and spawned both a trilogy and a touring Broadway musical.
Personally, I think it's a very interesting and educational idea that forces you to look at all sides of a story or character.
The challenge this week, then, is to take a well-known story and turn something on its head, making the bad one good, or vice-versa. Perhaps evil King John wasn't so evil that he had his eight-year-old nephews assassinated? (Wait, that's been done. Check out Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time.) Perhaps a certain Sith Lord got a raw deal in the translation to the big screen? Or maybe the Terminator is merely misunderstood?
The deadline for this challenge is midnight Central time, Thursday, 7/16/09. Not surprisingly, we're still playing by the never-updated Official Rules of the Friday Challenge and playing for whatever is behind Door #3.
Now go have a
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