The Friday Challenge 2/19/2010

This week in The Friday Challenge

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Henry Vogel fills us in on the script-writing equivalent of National Novel Writing Month, Script Frenzy. Join the discussion...

Henry Vogel writes about the girl in the window, love at first site and the terror of requesting permission to marry a man's youngest daughter. Join the discussion...

Also, Kersley Fitzgerald shows us what truly important to writers, there is a week before the deadline for the current greater Friday Challenge, Splatter Cinema. Finally, Otogu (Other things of greater urgency) demanded a sacrifice this week. Alas, it was Ultimate Geek Fu. All this and more, this week in The Friday Challenge!

And now, let's look at the entries for this week's lesser Friday Challenge, Three Little Things.

Three Little Things

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The Bandit - Fitzgerald's Sinead

Watkinson - Imperial Stormtrooper #TK-421

Miko - Boop-Oop-a-Doop

Arisia - Severus Snape

If I've missed anyone's entry, please let me know.

An interesting collection, ranging from a character created for our Christmas Story Friday Challenge (Sinead's story can be found here, password "challenge") to a character from the days of black-and-white cartoons. As always, even if you haven't submitted an entry this week—even if you've never submitted 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' sites, either. Writers thrive on knowing that someone out there is actually reading their words. The winner will be announced on Sunday, February 21, at 9:00 PM CST.

And now for this week's challenge.

Future Olympics

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Anyone with a television (i.e. most of us except Vidad) knows that the Winter Olympics are currently underway in Vancouver. This is the year the Boy has finally chosen to get really interested in the Olympics, recording all of the broadcasts, watching sports he'll never show any interest in for the next four year and pulling for the athletes from his country. In other words, acting just every other fan of the Olympics.

What I find most interesting about the Winter Olympics is the proliferation of relatively new sports included in the games. I cut my teeth on the 1968 Winter Olympics (and will never be able to explain to a child who watched the U.S. win six medals in one day just how much Peggy Flemming's lone gold medal meant to this country). For decades there was little change in the winter sports included in the games. Suddenly we're watching people pounding over moguls, making crazy twists and spins from the half pipe and, my personal favorite, racing four at a time in the snowboardcross. Many of these sports are so new they've only been around for twenty years or so.

And that brings us to our challenge for this week. Who could have imagined that a simple invention such as the snowboard would lead to the Olympic sports we watch today? Oh, probably anybody with any amount of imagination, that's all. Give people a new toy and within ten minutes someone is going to be creating some kind of competition for the toy. And that's our challenge for this week.

Create a new sport for the Olympics of the future. The sport can be simple or complex, something as straight forward as a race or as complex as a judged event. This is for the future, so feel free to "invent" things that don't exist, such as gravity-free arenas or floatboards or bio-sculpted creatures. The only restriction is the creation must be required for the competition. You do not need to create jargon for the sport nor work out all the details of the scoring system in a judged sport (though you might get scored for a higher level of difficulty by the judges if you do either or both of these). The idea is to provide enough description that we can envision the sport from a spectator's point of view.

As always, we're playing by the badly out-of-date Official Rules of the Friday Challenge and playing for whatever is behind equally badly out-of-date Door #3. The deadline for this challenge is midnight Central time, Thursday, February 25.

And also as always: remember, the objective here is to have fun!