This week in The Friday Challenge...
Kersley Fitzgerald continues her story-by-story roundup of the latest major magazines, tackling Asimov's this week, and also reviews Diving Into The Wreck, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Is Kris truly a Big Fat Author? Not the last time I saw her, but that is always an occupational hazard for writers. Join the discussion...
Henry Vogel discusses football, surprise plays, and how to plant and care for the seeds of your surprise ending so that your readers won't accuse you of suffering from M. Night Shyamalan's Disease. Join the discussion...
Ultimate Geek Fu started out to be a discussion of the best and worst Superbowl halftime shows but turned into an extended paean to The Who, and then devolved into an old Slappy Squirrel sketch. Go figure. Join the discussion...
Avatargate breaks and becomes a headline-dominating international scandal! Well, no, not really, but the circumstantial evidence doesn't look good for James "Oops, I forgot I plagiarized The Terminator from an old Harlan Ellison Outer Limits script" Cameron. Join the discussion...
The Recently Received list receives a long-overdue update. Looking for free books and really new reading? Here's a list of the newest of the new books, available free for the taking—but there's just one catch. Read more...
Also, Kersley Fitzgerald explains the importance of character arc (2010 calendars are still available!), the inmates discuss the views from their respective places in the asylum, Door #3 receives a hasty and still-incomplete update, and Miko is the winner of the 1/22/10 Friday Challenge, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place". All this and more, this week in The Friday Challenge!
And with that said, we move on to new business.
Wii for Geezers
As you might remember, the 1/29/10 challenge was to envision a Wii game that could be played pleasurably by senior citizens in a nursing home, and then name the game and sell the idea to the rest of us. As of the deadline, we have received the following entries:
Patrick Henry, "Wii Vegetable Gardening"
Arisia, "Wii VAX"
WaterBoy, "Wii Depression"
Miko, "Geezer Wii-Zer"
Watkinson, "The Wiind in the Willows!"
If I've missed anyone's entry, please let me know.
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 7, at a time to be determined by the quality of the New Orleans Saints.
And now for this week's challenge.
Splatter Cinema
This challenge comes to us courtesy of Arisia, who writes (paraphrasing extensively now to omit chatty and identifying personal details):
My son and his business partner are trying to establish themselves as indie filmmakers and are looking for scripts for short (20 minutes or less) horror films that can be made on very low budgets with amateur talent. Everybody is working on spec, for a share of the profits if there ever are any, and their films end up entered in independent film festivals and screened at fan cons. Their work so far has been real blood-and-guts stuff, but they're also interested in sci-fi...The more we discussed this, the more we felt that this has the makings of a Greater Challenge. Not to write a full 20-minute script—no, that's a heck of a lot of work for a Friday Challenge—but to come up with a treatment for a sci-fi/horror story that could be filmed as a 20-minute short, on next to no budget.
Can't be done? Think back to The Twilight Zone or Night Gallery and subtract out the intro, outtro, and commercial-break times. Those shows ran about twenty minutes, tops, and no one's ever argued that they weren't complete stories. Rod Serling and Richard Matheson built entire careers on making sometimes unforgettable 20-minute sci-fi and horror movies that were filmed on rudimentary sets and really low budgets.
So that's your assignment for this week: we want you to start thinking of ideas that could conceivably be developed into short scripts. Don't do more than jot notes to yourself; we've decided to make this a Greater Challenge, so the deadline for finished entries is Thursday, February 25, and in the days to come we'll be discussing the mechanics of writing script treatments. (Which are not to be confused with scripts.) We haven't quite decided yet what we'll spot as a prize: we were thinking of putting up J. Michael ("Babylon 5") Straczynski's utterly authoritative phonebook, The Complete Book of Scriptwriting, but that's still open to discussion.
Ergo, for now: put on your thinking caps, and get your idea mill churning. No deadline this week. Put your slack time to good use.
Regards,
~brb
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