Story #1: "The Cannonball Run" is LIVE! It's a long one! You can download a PDF (if you like nice formatting) or you can read it online in HTML (if you'd like to see who submitted what).



A few awards for this week's backers:

Most inspirational: Rod Naber with "A 1976 Pontiac Trans-Am driven by an aging Burt Reynolds. The speedometer is at 93 mph. The year is 2017." This one ended up being the starting point for the whole story. What better way to cover all those settings and characters than with a break-neck global race and an ensemble cast?

Most challenging: Jonathan Ryan with Soseki Natsume's "I Am a Cat" meets Neuromancer by way of Kundera's Immortality. With elves. First off, I've never read "I Am a Cat", so it was Wikipedia cliffs notes for those. This submission ended up being the core of the story (except the elves part - I just slipped that in). Neuromancer's "Straylight Run" to confront a machine intelligence became the "Svalbard Run". The philosophical issues struggled with in Immortality became inverted here as Mont Blanc grapples with longer life. I Am a Cat, loosely interpreted as a story of adaptation to a modern world, also figures in as Mont Blanc's traditional views on aging are faced with modern science's genetic technology.

Longest sentence: Noah Keating. 99 words. No kidding.

Second longest sentence: Royal McGraw. 82 words. You guys are totally sadists.

My favorite setting this week: Boone's Saloon, courtesy Richie Rosebush.

My favorite character this week: Elsa the recovering Pharisee, from Lana Vaughan. She was by far the most challenging and the one I felt like I had to work on the most

My favorite sentence this week: Eva Chan's "Clipped to his bike, he found a strip of yellowed graph paper with neat handwritten text that fit between the small grid lines, "Οὔ με πείσεις, κάν με πείσεις."" (That's ancient Greek. Thanks, Google.)

My favorite word this week: Vituperative from Nick Disabato. Awesome word and totally new to me!

My favorite thing I came up with totally on my own and can't help bragging about a little bit: Garry Kasparov living in Dmitry Shostakovich's St. Petersburg apartment. I love both Kasparov and Shostakovich and really liked writing a link between the two of them. If you ever have the chance to read William Vollman's Europe Central, which is the book that introduced me to Shostakovich, I highly, highly recommend it.



A few notes about this week's process: This story took me all day Saturday and Sunday to write. Longer, admittedly, than I had expected. You were mighty this week, Collective! I had The Cannonball Run knocking around in my head for a few days prior so on Friday night I rented the movie and watched it on my laptop while I tried to put together some sort of outline with all the characters and settings. Saturday morning, I started banging away on the keyboard. And I didn't finish until just before halftime of that football contest everyone was so excitable about.

I'm pretty happy with this week's story though with some small caveats. I realize, now, that a little bit more time for editing would be great. I also think this one came out long. I want to try and hold myself to shorter stories in the next five.



A few songs from this week's soundtrack:

Girls: "Hellhole Ratface"

Phoenix: "1901"

Heartless Bastards: "The Mountain"

Le Switch - "Hard Talkin'"



And a few admissions: I was (much to my own surprise) able to fit everything in as it was submitted. With two exceptions: 1) I added a single, solitary 's' to Nick Lamb's "Off in the distance through a haze akin to that of a nuclear winter he could just make out the seemingly lifeless body of a child." I made it "...she could just make out..." 2) From Nichole James' "If they can make ridiculous products like glue out of horses and soap out of Jews, why can't they make something logical, like duct tape out of ducks?" I removed "...soap out of Jews..." at the last moment because I was worried about its humor being lost on too many people. Apologies Nick and Nichole!

Well that was fun! What next? I'll ask for new submissions tomorrow. In the meantime, invite a friend to come get involved. Let's try and get to at least 100 backers for Story #2!