Day 5 Challenge - April 22, 2013

Hi it’s Christina –

Happy Monday mornin’ y’all! Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend. Mine was busy. My puppy graduated from training school; we are all very proud of our Colby. We had our invisible fence adjusted so now Colby can be outside with us and we don’t have to worry about him running into traffic. We did some overdue spring cleaning (yup, still lots to do, but we started). We mowed the grass for the first time this year. Helped a friend with her yard sale, she’s moving this week, so we’ll be helping with that as well. As I said, BUSY, but it’s all good.

So, did anyone take up yesterday’s challenge? One person commented back to me that their writing wouldn’t compare to mine and they’d appear not smarter than a 5^th grader, so they wouldn’t try. L THIS ISN’T SUPPOSED TO BE A CONTEST. This was supposed to be fun. Each of us has a little writer within ourselves. This was just meant to get some of your creative juices flowing. The more you write, the better you get. No one’s writing is better than someone else’s, it’s just different. True, one can have better grammar or spelling, but those are things which can be taught; it’s the ideas, the story which show the creativity. There are books out there which are deemed “a classic” or “an example of what literature should be”, but I’d rather stick pins in my eyes than have to read them again because as far as I was concerned the stories were utter drivel.  So please, give the challenges a try. You may just surprise yourself.

Yesterday’s challenge was:

They are doing a modern day remake of “I Love Lucy”, but they want to keep it as light and innocent as the original. You are asked to come up with the story for one episode.

I’ll admit, this one was not easy for me, and quite frankly my reply doesn’t thrill me, but here it is:

 “Little Ricky” isn’t so little anymore. In the fall he will be going off to college, but for the summer he wants to backpack across Europe. He just has to try and convince his parents to let him go…and to flip the bill. Scene opens in their New York apartment (I always felt the show “jumped the shark” when they moved out to the country). Lucy is sitting on the couch looking distraught and wringing the life out of a hankie she’s grasping. Ethel walks in to canned applause.

“What has you so upset you had me running up here in such a hurry? I’m getting way too old to be running up these stairs every time you think you’re having a crisis. Now if Fred wasn’t so cheap and we moved to one of those fancy places with an elevator…”

“Oh Ethel, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” (Lucy whines and sniffs into her hankie.)

(Ethel sits beside her on the couch and puts her arm around Lucy.) “Honey, what’s wrong?”

As I said, I didn’t get very far and it’s really quite bad. Sorry about the commentary in the beginning, I couldn’t resist. As you can see, I have no clue how to write a script or if that was the proper way to do (scene cues), but I thought the scenario was plausible…no?

Anywho… on to day 5 challenge:

You’re in an Irish pub with friends, each taking turns telling long-winded jokes. It’s your turn. Make us laugh. (Please keep them PG rated at most, there are some younger folks who read the site.)

Same rules - You have 10 minutes (be honest). There is no right or wrong, just write. Spelling and punctuation don’t count and NO ONE is allowed to criticize what someone else has written. Go.