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)

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 #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.

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.

Sample: The Legend of Charezahn

It’s been a week since I first started sneezing, but I’m still far from recovery. I have no idea what sort of vindictive bug this one is, but one thing for sure, it’s nasty.

Try as I may, I could not get myself into the mood to start on the Longbow post, which I had planned to have up here instead of this one. Stuff happens, though, and you have to make the best of it.

Lucky for me, I had already begun chapter one of Charezahn earlier, so I thought I’d put up a sample of it here this time. It needs plenty of work, and I’m very aware that it’s not fit for print; but I’m just too darn tired to put up anything else right now.

Following is an excerpt from chapter one of The Legend of Charezahn. If you think I should continue, please let me know. Thanks.