JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

The winner of our Drogon and Sherlock caption contest are:

ayms for “The Sign of Fur”. (Which suggests you already have these books, in which case you could give them to someone who hasn’t read them yet.)

Momelia for “The Pale White Boys of Good Grooming”. Because we can’t tell who is whiter.

You both win the Bantam Classics Sherlock Holmes boxed set. Post your full names and current email addresses (The information will not be published) in Comments and we’ll email you directions for claiming your prize.

This contest was brought to you by National Bookstores.

Drogon is named after one of Daenerys’s dragons and Sherlock’s actor is the voice of Smaug so they are related.

Write a caption for these photos (or if you’re really bored, an entire story about them) and post it in Comments before 11.59pm on Friday, 27 June 2014. The composers of the two best captions will each get the Bantam Classic paperback Sherlock Holmes Complete Novels and Stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, courtesy of National Bookstore. (Buy your own poster.)

Illustrations from Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault by Harry Clarke. Images from Wikimedia Commons.

This month’s LitWit Challenge: Take any well-known fairy tale (Cinderella, Rumpelstiltzkin, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, etc) and write it your way, set in the present-day, yes the princesses can be gay. You may change the ending. You may alter the plot and setting as long as it the basic elements of the original remain recognizable.

500-word minimum, 2,000-word maximum. You may submit as many entries as you like. Deadline: 12 noon on 15 May 2014.

The prize: Vampires in the Lemon Grove—short stories by Karen Russell, Pantone notebook with squared pages, and a set of metallic gel pens. The blasted things are addictive—you start doodling with them at lunch, and before you know it it’s 3am and you’ve made two dozen bookmarks.

Prizes should be claimed at National Bookstore in Power Plant Mall, Rockwell, Makati within three months.

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

From our Book of Writing Backwards: Excerpt from the Bene Gesserit Manual in Dune. (In silver ink, hard to read.)

allancarreon: Good work and properly weird, although we wonder why you would portray a haven of books as…that place, and the practice of writing as a form of torment. Conflicted! Horror stories are all about atmosphere, even if the location seems ordinary.

“Behind him, a doppelganger of the man had appeared and was now following Annie closely…” could be made creepier. Don’t say “doppelganger”, describe it. “Suddenly there were two of him, and one was shadowing Annie…”

You are not eligible for the prize as you are the Keymaster of the Social Media Propaganda Ministry.

Helvatica123: Great concept, execution not bad, though this is more a concept paper than an actual story. Grammar and usage need a little work, but nothing the spelling and grammar checking function on Word can’t fix. We like the way you casually let the readers know what the books are made of without hitting us over the head with the information. The nonchalant tone adds to the horror when it sinks in. Keep on writing, we want to see more.

Momelia: Thank you for that tale of real-life horror. Apparently if you ask people to write stories set in libraries, they come up with visions of hell. This is more a diary entry than a story, but you clearly enjoyed writing it, and the bit about the bacon getting Facebook likes could be developed. In fact you could expand this into a story about a character who can’t move until her Facebook friends have affirmed her decision with 200 likes. We’d like to read that.

Check out the short stories of Saki, you’d love him. Sweet and nasty. “Children are given us to discourage our better emotions.”

lois: We have not read The Book Thief but we gather this is inspired by that. Good effort, and we like its ambitious scale. The execution needs work: you explain everything at least thrice and you overdo the dramatic description. However your plot is interesting, and with continued practice you will learn to “hear” yourself. The ability to self-edit comes with time.

joyeah: There’s a fascinating Twilight Zone-ish story in here, but you have buried it under a lot of adjectives and overwrought descriptive passages. It’s a mess. It might be useful to do an outline for this, with short profiles of the characters, and rewrite it. Try writing it in chronological order first, then when you’ve worked out your plot, you can do your structural experiment.

aspiringwriter29: Listen to yourself. “The potentially perpetual grim looming over the spectacle I have for a visage is now all but perpetual.” All that verbal writhing, just to say “The grimace is fixed on my face.” This piece is overwritten, the prose so purple it is overripe eggplant. You’re trying to write in a high, formal style before you have even figured out how to write a clear sentence. Since you’re writing about angels and demons, why not read the Old Testament, esp. Genesis and Exodus, King James Version? The sentences are short, unadorned yet powerful. None of this lurid stuff.

The winner of The Universe is a Library LitWit Challenge is Helvatica123. Congratulations! Post your full name and email address in Comments (It won’t be published) and the elves will tell you how to claim your prize.

We might argue that libraries are singularities—so many fictional and non-fictional lives, so many time periods converging on a single point. At the very least, they make excellent settings for stories.

The LitWit Challenge this month, should you choose to accept it, is to write a story of 500 words or more set in a library. Any library, actual or imaginary. It could be a mystery in which the heroine races against time to locate a vital piece of information that would save civilization. It could be a time-travel adventure in which library patrons can enter the worlds described in books. It could be a horror thriller in which library patrons are walled up in the stacks. It could be a romance in which an anonymous admirer leaves love letters spelled out by the spines of old books. It could be Anything.

Post your stories in Comments before Sunday, 20 April 2014. The winner will receive a toy Philippine Eagle and 8 Twisted books signed by the author.

Start writing.

This video is For Mature Audiences Only. Meaning we can’t watch it.

If you’ve ever been curious about the Seiko movie from the 90s called Talong (Eggplant, Aubergine), here it is. “Tiffany, a young and confused artist finds inspiration in Edong, a handsome talong farmer. Tiffany bumps into Edong one evening in a public market but loses him during that first meeting. In a Cinderella twist, Edong leaves behind an enormous talong which tiffany uses to track down her Prince Charming.” Thank you, YouTube.

aspiringwriter29, for making the effort to use three or four titles for each line of dialogue. Congratulations! Post your full name in Comments (It won’t be published) and we’ll alert you when your prize has been delivered to National Bookstore in Power Plant Mall, Rockwell.

Read all the entries here, they’re hilarious.