JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

“I never travel without my diary,” wrote Oscar Wilde. “One should always have something sensational to read on the train.” This piece of advice changed my attitude towards journal-writing completely. If you had a boring, uneventful day, why bore yourself all over again by recounting it in your diary?

Oh, right, posterity. You’re assuming that in the future people will be interested in your day-to-day existence. Maybe if you invent a teleportation device or figure out how to turn air into food. But if you’re hoping to be remembered for your diary of life in the early part of the 21st century, stop.

People, you have to be considerate. You can’t just think about yourselves—think about the people who might read your diary. Your nosy boyfriend or girlfriend, your mother (Aaaaaaaaaaaaa), the servants, colleagues who hate you. Do you want to confirm their suspicion that you are slowly but surely expiring from ennui? You have a blog/facebook account for that; your secret personal diary is another matter. Give them something to make their eyes pop out of the backs of their heads.

Your assignment this week: Write a diary of your week. Any seven-day stretch. Make it Sensational. Exaggerate. Embellish the facts, gild the truth, fabricate a life if you have to. Give the Yucch-meter something sensational to read on the last week of 2010.

Word limit for all seven entries: 1,000 words.
The prize: Two winners will each receive the Moleskine hardcover pocket daily diary 2011.
Deadline: 12 noon on Sunday, 2 January 2011.

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

Photograph by the Hubble telescope

We received ten entries for LitWit Challenge 4.1: An extraterrestrial lands in Manila. Here are the Yucch-meter’s findings.

#1 Benedict Taft

– “lends discretion over my distinguishing feature”???
– The extraterrestrial narrator laughs at the humans for consuming water and wheat and utilizing wheels but does not state what the “advanced” alternatives are.
– If the extraterrestrial is so intelligent it would know that “species” is singular and plural and never “specie”.
– Time warp is not a verb but a noun.

#2 stellalehua

– The piece is entertaining and well-written but takes the assignment too literally.
– The Rolex bit is funny until you think about it. Gold or platinum, which occur naturally, can be the waste products of some process. Rolexes are fairly complex manufactured goods and cannot be waste products. There goes the punchline.
– This story is too safe, like homework designed to please the teacher.

#3 Cacs

– Describing a space voyage: Good.
– Taking the Filipino diaspora interstellar: Very good.
– Explaining the Filipino aspiration to work abroad: Brilliant.

#4 2Qt2BSTR8

– “Doldrums” is a plural noun referring to “low spirits”. It is not a musical instrument.
– Corporate ennui leading to possible nervous breakdown: Interesting.
– Miss Universe punchline: Limits story’s audience to Pinoys aware of our beauty pageant fixation. This is a common issue in contemporary Philippine literature: We talk amongst ourselves and do not feel compelled to address the world at large.

#6 oberstein

– You have style and wit but this is too much effort for a dick joke.

#7 kindler

– Like #2, an overly literal interpretation of the assignment.
– Clever use of current events and hot topics.
– The Soylent Green plot is a hoot.
– We could see the punchline coming from the Cat’s Eye Nebula.

#8 samutsari

– At last, a story about aliens that does not mention outer space, advanced technology, or aliens outright.
– Finds weirdness in the most mundane things. This is more interesting to us than weird for weird’s sake.
– Brings up the possibility that our extraterrestrial neighbors have not revealed themselves because we are too bizarre and immature.

#9 Cacs

– Aba, poetic Tagalog.
– Very clever. Perhaps we need to designate a senior division in the next series of LitWits.
– We did not see that punchline coming. Hah!
– We think of it as Arthur C. Clarke’s The Star, as told by the star.
Read The Star here.

#10 dibee

– An attempt at an interstellar romance.
– The story itself has time dilation problems. This may be intentional but it does not make the story more readable. The search for the sister is said to take years, but all that time is taken up by the search and the relationship is not developed. (It’s not enough to say “What had been a childish fascination turned to a womanly desire” (Yucch); demonstrate it.) And then the wait takes decades but is dispensed with in a couple of paragraphs.
– We like the melancholy tone of the piece.
– The last sentence is cheating. If you feel the need to explain then you do not have complete confidence in your story.

#11 angus

– We are not convinced that this is a story about an extraterrestrial. We think it’s how you spent your weekend. Kidding.

The winner of LitWit Challenge 4.1: An extraterrestrial lands in Manila iiiiiiiiisssssssss. . .

Cacs, for both the interstellar diaspora and the meteorite.

Congratulations, Cacs! Pick up your prize any day starting Tuesday December 28 at the Customer Service counter, National Bookstore, Power Plant Mall, Rockwell, Makati.

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

You have classes, jobs, lives, obligations, chores, relationships, brats, cats, dogs, friends, parents, sidelines, gym, training, hobbies, ferrets, parakeets, fish, plants, but week in and week out you summon up the time and energy to turn in 1,000 words for the Weekly LitWit Challenge. For what? For a book you could buy yourself, for snippets of advice you may not even need or use.

You join the Weekly LitWit Challenges for the best of all possible reasons: None! You write because you want to. That’s how you become a writer.

Thanks to our very cool friends at National Bookstore for supporting the Weekly LitWit Challenge and giving us the complete freedom to write whatever we like.

The winner of LitWit Challenge 4.1 will be announced shortly, and then LitWit Challenge 4.2 goes online.

Hieronymus Bosch, The Seven Deadly Sins

We don’t have enough contestants, which will put the Yucch-meter in an even fouler mood than usual, so we’re extending the deadline for LitWit Challenge 4.1 to Friday, 16 December 2010 at 12 noon.

We assume that the contestants are (a) stuck in traffic, (b) rehearsing their numbers for the company Xmas variety show and festival of embarrassment, (c) out shopping, (d) comatose from stress, (e) still thinking of a plot involving aliens that hasn’t been done to death, (f) hungover, (g) suffering the ill effects of gluttony.

Now that we think about it, Xmas the season of “peace on earth and goodwill to all men” is also peak season for the seven deadly sins:

Avarice. Presents! Presents! Gimme more presents!

Sloth. You tell yourself that there’s no point in writing that report as no work gets done during the holiday season anyway, but that’s just sloth.

Pride. Year-round offense.

Lust. Daily.

Envy. How come he gets a car and I get a lousy T-shirt?

Gluttony. The lechon was there ten seconds ago.

Wrath. What you feel when you’re standing in a long queue at the ATM and a woman is withdrawing money for 20 people from 20 separate accounts.

Cue Brad Pitt impression: What’s in the baaaax? What’s in the baaaaax?

Now we’re in the mood for some Fincher.

The movie we’re really looking forward to: The Fighter starring Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, directed by David O. Russell. The one where Wahlberg tries to cop some Pac-Man moves. We love David O. Russell. Three Kings!

Note: Just because it involves extraterrestrials doesn’t mean that your entry has to be a science-fiction story. Just out of contrariness the Yucch-meter would be inclined to favor a story in a realist vein.

Welcome to the fourth series of the Weekly LitWit Challenge, a literary competition that tests your writing skills, your powers of invention under duress, your sense of absurdity, and your self-esteem. And your ability to “read” the Yucch-meter’s mind, because the criteria for judging are arbitrary and more than slightly influenced by the Yucch-meter’s serotonin/endorphin levels. If you are the emotionally-fragile, artsy sort who needs someone to hold your hand and give you a gold star for your “creative self-expression”, Go Away. We write, we are serious, shut up and begin.

This is Dino Ignacio, one of the coolest people I’ve ever met. He lives in San Francisco where he works at Electronic Arts. He designed the user interface of Dead Space and Dante’s Inferno. Dino founded the Webby Award-winning site Bert Is Evil and produced the animated Maritess vs The Superfriends. (I watched it yesterday for the first time in many years—it’s still hilarious.) He also designed my first website, twisted.com.ph.

While watching Maritess I suddenly remembered the time Dino found a box containing a full Jollibee mascot costume on the sidewalk in Greenhills. Reret and I tried to convince him to put on the mascot outfit, go to McDonald’s, and challenge Hamburglar to a duel.

We haven’t seen each other in ages, but yesterday when I sent him a hologram that began, “General Dino, years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars,” he answered immediately. It’s good to know that the Jedi remain solid.

If you live in the Bay area you may have seen Dino shopping for groceries in his complete Star Wars Imperial Stormtrooper uniform. This is Dino in his 2009: A Space Grocery outfit.

Here are your instructions for LitWit Challenge 4.1.

An extraterrestrial being lands in the metropolitan Manila area.
Maximum 1,000 words.
Deadline: 11.59pm, Sunday, 12 December 2010.
If you have any questions, best to keep them to yourself.
The prize: It’s a surprise. Oh all right it’s this.

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

The Glass Family stories with rubber duckies

The Yucch-meter hunkered down with a pot of coffee to read your entries to LitWit Challenge 3.12: Conversations in restaurants. It stands to reason that writing a conversation in a restaurant is an easy task since everyone at one time or another has had a conversation in a restaurant.

Reason is wrong.

#4 kracle: This is a story of a tiresome female going on and on about her exercise regimen to a disinterested party who is barely trying to be polite. Interesting premise, could be funny but isn’t. The female seems to be reading rather than speaking.

#7 ficklecattle: This is promising–almost sounds like an actual conversation–but note how one of the protagonists self-consciously explains the proceedings for the benefit of the audience. “The guy just asked you to ask me to take off my clothes, at the least, for a private show.” Apparently he knows he is a character in a story. “It’s just, well, think of it this way”. . .over-explanation, Tagalog movie style.

#8 triphammer: If your intention is to sound British you could at least get the usage right. Look up the meaning of “bint”. (Obviously this one is not a Monty Python fan.) The Yucch-meter suspects this one is a devotee of Guy Ritchie laddie movies.

#9 androidiscool: Why bother joining contests when you and your tiresome androids can just talk amongst yourselves? By all means write for yourself but when you publish it, you address an audience.

#12 johnbristol16: The Yucch-meter realizes this dialogue is meant to be cute and funny but outside of its limited audience it has the appeal of enamel being ripped off teeth.

#15 cough-syrup-junkie: So she kills her husband for a teenage rugby player and not only do they discuss it in a public place but she feels compelled to explain the details, motives, etc for the benefit of everyone who happens to be listening in. “He gave me everything I wanted. A huge house, expensive wardrobes, jewelry.” This is how it sounds in Tagalog: “Ibinigay niya ang lahat na gusto ko. Malaking bahay, mga mamahaling aparador, alahas.” Wardrobe, singular.

#19 winnerific: Blah blah blah blah blah. This kind of meet-cute story should take ten lines at most.

#20 Paul: There’s a story in there involving deals with the devil but the author is more intent on heaping abuse upon the Revihilda character than on developing the plot.

#21 aimubear: A funny take on the romantic comedy’s obsession with “destiny”. Would work better if the characters had. . .character.

#22 triphammer: Another one from the Guy Ritchie school of movie writing. Minus the logic, the coherence, and the humor.

#23 iceproof: Holy crap, a conversation about real-world concerns. Good effort. However, the Yucch-meter had a hard time understanding the prose because English words are “Filipinised” by spelling them phonetically. Of course this is perfectly acceptable to many readers. Unfortunately it is the Yucch-meter who chooses the winner.

#24 jake: Jake, Jake, Jake. You are one of the Yucch-meter’s favorite contestants. But you need to try some other schtick once in a while or Raymond Carver will rise from the grave and bite you.

#25 angus25: This is not a conversation. They are reading magazines to each other.

#26 Android No. 1 and #27 S. Mack: You have submitted the same entry under different names. In fact you have registered on this site about 20, 30 times. Subscribers do forget their passwords but 20 usernames is just creepy. The Yucch-meter declines to read your story.

#28 turmukoy: Thank you! The sound of real people! The seriousness of the characters’ tones is appropriate as they are former activists. That they are lured into capitalism via technology is both funny and true to life.

#29 Cacs: Very amusing explanation of how the world works, with a special emphasis on religion and cinema.

#30 illiterati: The Yucch-meter wishes to express her solidarity with every guy who has ever asked a girl what she couldn’t talk about on the phone and gotten, “It’s about, you know, what’s been happening between us”. We urge you to run out the door as fast as you can.

#31 Evan: Clever. The reader is not subjected to tedious explanation, yet all is clear. The Yucch-meter would like to know: Why has clever become the province of gay people? Or has it always been a gay thing?

#32 dibee: A bit overwritten, needs copy-editing, but the plot is intriguing. Perverse, sordid, with enough detail so we can see the tale unfolding in our heads even if we wish it wouldn’t. Congratulations dibee, you are the winner of LitWit Challenge 3.12.

Please post your full name in Comments and we’ll inform you when you can pick up your prizes.

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

LitWit Challenge 4.1 is coming up.

dibee, you can pick up your prizes at National Bookstore in Rockwell, you know the drill.