The Iron Writer Challenge #79 Dellani Oakes

And here we are again. Another week, and another TIW challenge. This time, it’s C79, christened the Dellani Oakes Challenge, since it was she who supplied the four elements for this challenge rather than Brian, who supplies the elements usually.

(Oh yes, the Mathew Weaver Challenge is coming soon, too. Stay tuned!)

The back story for this one… I wanted in on the Autumn Open, the second quarterly tournament for the year. Since Jordan scraped ahead of me in C77, I had to win in some other challenge before the tournament (which happens to be on the 25^th of September, in case you wanted to know).

My dilemma: all challenges till then were filled, and the only empty slots available were the ones after the Autumn Tournament. Just as I was about to give up hope, I asked DL Zwissler if she would switch with me for one of her challenges, since she had already been in a few others

Thankfully, she graciously let me step in for her for C79, and so here I am. The elements, as we were given them:

                                    Genetically Enhanced Garden Gnomes

                                                          Camelot

                                                 Halitosis (bad breath)

                                             Stratego (the board game)

When Thoughts Go Wild and All Comes Out

 Disclaimer: The following blog post contains words and ideas not planned too far ahead before being written down and hastily edited. As such, undiluted rambling and distinctive lack of a fixed topic may be experienced.

Reader discretion is advised.

So you decided to brave it anyway. Thanks, I guess. Your belief in me is my inspiration and all that. Here we go.

Believe it or not, it isn’t always that I start writing with a fixed point in mind when it comes to my blog posts.

Sure, the last few ones found me lucky enough to actually have some sort of a point to stick to. Dragons, the latest form of head banging, roaches… there was a point, and I (more or less, admittedly) stuck to it.

Here, though, not so much. Nope, not a single idea on what I want to write about, and I sit with my hands moving and my fingers dancing and I see these words type themselves onto this page, the keys being pressed repeatedly at a good enough rate to ensure steady rhythm and a smooth flow of words.

The strangest thing about that smooth flow is that I have no idea what I’m about to write next. These words pouring out of me, they are instantaneous and as such have no more than a few fifteen seconds worth of planning before them. With little and no knowledge of what’s in store for both you and me at this point, here’s to buckling up and adjusting scuba masks before delving into the depths of my gibberish.

Here we go.

The Iron Writer Challenge #77 (Grudge #9)

The best part about being an Iron Writer is that most of us in the group who communicate regularly on the Facebook page have this sort of bond of kinship. I know, it does sound strange like that, but hear me out.

Most of us have never met the others in person (me not any, obviously), and we’re from the far flung corners of the earth. Brian Rogers, founder of the group, explicitly made it a rule that there was to be no self-promoting on the page. So, probably or want of something to do, the early Irons started bantering among themselves.

Friendships bloomed, alliances were formed, and rivalries were discovered… and out of those rivalries, the Grudge Match was born.

Basically, it’s a glorified weekly challenge where one Iron trash talked another till the gauntlet gets thrown. And this week, I am in one.

The Iron Writer Challenge #73 Summer Tournament Final

You know me as an author. Mostly comical, sometimes serious, but always… an author.

I don’t dabble much in poetry for a few reasons. One, I have this strange feeling that poems should, somehow, someway, rhyme. I have no idea why I sometimes see a jumble of words that don’t rhyme being referred to as ‘poetry'. Just correct me if I’m wrong, thanks.

And the second reason… I’m no poet, fair and simple. Thank you very much.

Why bring poetry in all of a sudden? I’m getting there.

Thanks to the unexpected win I pulled over the heads of fellow Irons Dani J Caile, Jordan Bell and Suzann Smith in The Iron Writer Summer Tournament Preliminary, I was pulled into the Final. Ergo, I was given yet another Challenge to do, one that I never asked for. Sigh.

As always, the elements were four… but this time, it seemed a bit too easy. Judge for yourselves. They were:

A lost key

A travel brochure

A thermostat

Dessert topping

  

The Iron Writer Challenge #72

With a great amount of luck, I somehow pulled through and managed to win the preliminary round on the Iron Writer tournament. (this was my story…)

All you guys who voted for me, thank you ever so much. The popular vote helped save me back there, and I owe it all to you.

You would think I’d be happy on this victory. At first, oh yeah. Ego stoked and everything. But then, along came the news that I had qualified to the next and final round… and that would be against the other three winners of the same preliminary.

So, the prize for winning… was another challenge. Oh, great. The good news was that this second round would be held two weeks after the round I just completed; which gave me a week off while another unrelated challenge took place.

see?

Then came the call… and I remembered that I had signed up for that middle challenge, too.

The Iron Writer Challenge #71

  

When I said I was feeling lazy, I didn’t expect to take an almost two week break from posting. But somehow, that’s exactly what happened.

I just wasn’t in the mood to write, and so I didn’t.

  

But I had to come back to this thing eventually; and so here I am, vacation sadly over. Sigh.

And once again, on the Iron Writer.

Thanks to my first ever story, the one I managed to win, I apparently got into the quarterly tournament. It's big deal here, since it happens only once in every three months. You know how in the regular weekly tournament, there are just four writers with the four elements? Well, in this, there are sixteen writers with the same set of elements.

The Tale of The Cat and The Monkey - When TIWs Gather

And it happened again.

Ever since the shenanigans that Dani J Caile and I got up to on account of Neal’s goatee, I have instinctively been looking out for a time when Dani and I could do a similar bit of creative dueling once more. Apparently, he’s been looking out for the same thing, but neither of us seemed to find a convenient enough avenue to start it off.

Until the other day, when Dani decided to take matters into his own hands.

Everything worthwhile needs something good to kick it off; in this case, the kick off happened innocently enough. All I did was share a picture on my timeline. This one, to be exact.

A few hours later, I saw this. Innocent enough, you would say. Not to him, and not to me.

Of course, I did what you would expect me to have done. The gauntlet had been thrown. The time had come once more. So I drew my Sword of Creativity and plunged in. 

The Iron Writer Challenge #68

Since joining the Iron Writers, my newly blossoming career took a turn for the better in a way I had never fully expected.

Hanging out with those experienced writers is a truly amazing experience; having them talk and treat you like an equal, being able to ask them for advice, and poking at each other in our regular banter, each of them backing you and cheering you up when you feel down… I feel truly blessed to be a part of this group.

Of course, there was a catch to all that. I still had to take part in some of those beastly weekly challenges… and I remain as useless at flash fiction as a plumber at aeronautical engineering. But if I’m to stick around at The Iron Writer, sooner or later I will have to spar in another challenge, and another.  The only way I’m going to manage to survive… would be to (ugh) practice.

So, like the fool that I usually am, I signed up for another challenge, and a few more down the road as well. What was I thinking, you ask? I probably wasn’t thinking anything; if I was, I wouldn’t have done this to myself.

So here we are again, and its Challenge 68… my second Iron Writer bout. And this time, I was up against even more experienced adversaries.

On Makeovers and Making Do

Quite a few things happened in the last two days since the previous post. Firstly, by some lucky coincidence, my contribution to The Iron Writer Challenge #62 managed to pull through and get voted the best. Have to admit, I did not see that coming. This would be the same thing I wrote about three posts ago.

So now that I passed the initiation, I guess I really am a member of the Iron Writers… and this win has put me up for what they call the Summer Open; so I’m back up there on the 26^th of June. This time, against the winners of the other weekly Challenges.

As if that wasn’t enough for me, I went ahead and asked Brian to sign me up for another Challenge. So, C68 has my name on it, and that’s the 5^th of June. Better hope for another miracle.

And speaking of miracles… we got our telephone line restored a day ago, and Wi-Fi is officially back up and running again here at home. Until, of course, the next big disaster.

These past 48 days have been extremely illuminating to me. Here’s some of what I’ve managed to learn: 

·         Getting pissed off will not, by any means, be of the slightest help to you if the object/person that you are pissed off at is not within crushing/strangling reach,

·         The mood of your mother will depreciate at a rate faster than that of yours when you are in an emotionally disturbed state. This rate of depreciation will accelerate in direct proportion with the cost of objects that get mortally affected during outbursts

·         If you though that the public sector was lazy and incompetent before you found yourself in a crisis that required their assistance, your faith in that belief is only strengthened as time goes along,

And most important of all:

·         When there’s nothing else to do… just start writing.

The Tale of The Depressed Goatee – When TIWs Gather

It was a few months ago when I joined The Iron Writers, and since then, it’s been uphill for me. The confidence I was lacking, the inspiration I needed; I found it all there, being shared out liberally among all the amazing, incredible people who make up the group.

Each and every single writer there is unique in their way, and yet at the same time, they all share one beautiful quality: they know how to have fun.

In between the soul draining, four-element-related challenges that Brian constantly manages to cook up, TIWs keep things going on the group Facebook page, and it looks like one of the job specifications of being an Iron Writer is to be able to embarrass, insult, harass and victimize fellow respected Irons on a constant basis, all in the name of sharing laughs.

 Wars of words rage, and alliances form and break off quicker than those in Westeros; and when the gauntlet is thrown, things are settled in what TIWs call a Grudge Match, which, though I’m still fuzzy about it, I’m willing to try out should the occasion arise.

Suffice it to say that there’s always something interesting or downright hilarious going on there. Most of the time, I watch from the sidelines and poke a cautious needle when the opportunity presents itself, but since I’m still a newbie, I try not to get right down into it.

The unexpected happened, though, when fellow Iron Writer Neal Sayatovich changed his profile picture recently, and in it he displayed a truly magnificent growth of facial hair. It literally begged for comment, and comments did it get, courtesy of yet another talented IW, Dani J Caile.

The Iron Writer Challenge #62

I have never been fond of writing flash fiction. Maybe it started back in the fourth and fifth grades when my teacher used to tell us to write essays or stories under a specific word limit. I always, always jumped that limit. I guess I always hated writing within any sort of specific barriers.

Still do.

So, probably the last thing you would think of me doing would be to join a writer’s group based around weekly and even daily flash fiction challenges.

Ask me about it a month ago and I would have been “Puh-leeze, no,”

But when Brian Rogers himself, the man behind the Iron Writer Challenge, ask you to join… you would be crazy not to.

And so join I did, and in doing so, chalked up one more thing right that I’ve done as your friendly neighborhood anonymous Mathew.

The basic structure of the Iron Writer challenge; four authors are given four days to come up with a five hundred word piece of any genre that contains four given elements. And Brian never lets his people have it easy, no. He just thinks up the most incompatible, mismatched, unusable objects and then meshes them together for each week’s challenge.

New Life To Old Thoughts

There comes a time in the life of every writer when he/she sits down at their laptop ready to work, and finds, to their dismay, that their minds are as blank as the page in front of them.

To date, it has not been scientifically proven whether not this affliction is contagious, and reports concerning its possible fatal consequences have not as yet been confirmed.

That said, it is one mangy pest of a nuisance when it hits; and the handful of survivors out there can attest to how doubly hard it is to get rid of. A few cures to it have been found by veteran writers; divine inspiration being one of them, but for some reason, that doesn’t seem to be as common as it once was in the Renaissance era.

Simple inspiration, on the other hand, is a little more common, yet, alas, not common enough in day to day life to send this miserable affliction the same merry way as smallpox. (It was merry for us, at least). Examples of such inspiration would be a movie, a book, a conversation, or a grain of thought that can take root and blossom into something as far away from a blank page as… well, a piece of writing.

On Phone Calls and Writing Bursts

Ever wanted to know how to become famous among your extended family? How to rise through the ranks of gossip topics that your aunts tear to bits at every family gathering?

Well, hunt no more, weary seeker. Through toil and torture I have searched and yearned (no, not really), but at long last, I have found a sure fire, two step method with guaranteed results.

It’s simple.

a)      Get an injury. Doesn’t have to be major, should just be large enough to constantly remind people of its existence and be a nuisance enough to make you complain about it once in a while just for kicks.

b)      Let your mother find out.

I had my incredible acrobatic feat at midnight Saturday in the Big City; and it was a full twenty four hours before I got home. I hadn’t told mum about my little predicament, obviously; but there’s no way to hide a drooping, swollen lip when it’s quite literally on your face.

It was kind of like Andrew Garfield turning around and showing Aunt May his face after his first night out in a proper Spidey costume, which, quite by chance, involved a close and extremely personal introduction with the front and side of a moving bus. I know, my cut was barely a fraction of what he had on his face, but the respective expressions involved in that exchange were pretty much the same: my mother was like “Oh God, what happened to you, how could this….” etc., and I was all, “It’s nothing, Mum, please, please go back to sleep…”