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Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, hero and villain of There Will Be Blood.

We have no winner for LitWit Challenge 6.6 so we are extending the deadline to Sunday, 14 August 2011 at 11.59 pm.

Some useful tips:
1. The title is “Let’s hear it from the villains.” The piece should be written from the POV of the villain. It is not about you.
2. We do not need a summary of the book or movie. Nor do we need the villain to introduce herself/himself. The trick is to drop enough clues so we can identify the speaker.
3. Think of it as Method Writing. Put yourself in the mind of the villain. Consider the alien in Alien. “This species, though puny, makes an excellent incubator…”

Interesting entries for LitWit Challenge 6.5: Make rust beautiful.

crucial would win if this were a high school honors class.
red the mod would win if this were a purple-ness contest.
theOrbiter would win if this were an art criticism class.
fishy would win in a rhyming competition.
sad_ism wins for sheer geekiness. Congratulations, sad_ism! Please post your full name in Comments (it won’t be published) and we’ll alert you when your prize is ready.

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History is written by the victors, and books and movies are generally told from the hero POV. (Notable exceptions: Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Meursault in The Stranger, and Grendel in Grendel, John Gardner’s retelling of Beowulf.) Let’s play with that.

Your assignment this week: Let the “villain”: tell the story. For instance, Alien as told by the alien, Terminator from the terminator’s POV, The Lord of the Rings as told by Sauron (a Russian novelist already did the orc version), King Lear by Edmund, Sense and Sensibility according to the sister-in-law, or The Age of Innocence by Newland Archer’s wife whatshername. Your choice.

As always, 1,000-word maximum. Deadline: 11.59pm on Sunday, 7 August 2011. The chosen villain story gets these.

Two disturbing books: Postsecret for the anonymous contributors’ confessions, Hotel Iris for the twisted love story.

The Weekly LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.

Last Saturday on our hopia tour of Binondo we saw this.

It’s some kind of warehouse crammed with chains, hardware and all manner of junk. We found it strangely beautiful. So your assignment this week is to explain why this rust is beautiful.

Write us an essay of 500 words describing this picture and post it in Comments on or before 11.59 pm on Sunday, 31 July 2011. Remember: Beautiful.
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Thanks to everyone who participated in LitWit Challenge 6.3: Letters to your ex, part 2. A few amateur observations:

1. Some of you are still bitter and angry. Usually if you wish them dead it means you are not over them.
2. If you wrote really long letters to them it could mean you are still explaining the breakup to yourself because you are not over them.
3. If you wrote maudlin, self-pitying letters to them, we have a pretty good idea why they left.
4. Yes, they were shits. Ask yourself why you were attracted to a shit. When you’ve figured it out, forgive yourself and resolve not to do it again.
5. My druid told me that the real reason we embark on relationships is to discover things about ourselves that we wouldn’t have discovered on our own. Think about that the next time you complain that you gave everything or did all the work.
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The selection process for the winner of LitWit Challenge 6.2: Recharging Your Brain was a no-brainer. The winner is angus25. Congratulations, angus25, please post your full name in Comments (It won’t be published. We don’t keep files on your true identities and contact information.) and we’ll let you know when your prize has been delivered to National Bookstore in Power Plant Mall, Rockwell, Makati.

Our Weekly LitWit Challenge needs a little kick in the crotch to get restarted, and nothing delivers that kick more effectively than sordid self-exposure. Yours. Previous challenges have shown us that there’s nothing like spilling your guts. You release bottled-up emotions, we get to watch, and we all feel better afterwards.

So we’re revisiting one of the all-time favorites: Letter to your ex.

Your assignment, which you will choose to accept because it’s so juicy, is this. Write a letter to your ex (or if you never got together officially, the object of your affections) telling them all the things you were dying to say but never got around to verbalizing. Observe the 1,000-word maximum, please, anything more than that is self-indulgence. Post your letters in Comments. The deadline for your entries is 11.59pm on Saturday, 9 July 2011.

The prize for LitWit Challenge 6.3: Letter to your ex, part 2 is this gleaming new hardcover copy of the bestselling Swedish crime thriller.

Don’t bottle up your emotions so they can turn into neuroses; post them here so we all have something sensational to read!

The Weekly LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.

Photo: Lucban Girls Recharging Their Brains, 1978 by Uro de la Cruz.

Your assignment this week is to write us a story in 1,000 words or less from the point of view of one of the little girls.

Deadline: Sunday, 3 July 2011 at 11.59 pm.

The Prize: Three books. The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore: Human falls in love with chimpanzee. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (filmed as Blade Runner): Human falls in love with clone. Global Warming Survival Handbook: How to be less of an asshole in these difficult times.

We accept all genres. Make it riveting.

The Weekly LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.