So about that mystery assignment I spoke of last time: I’m auditioning for a writer’s slot at TVgasm. (The name is silly, but the recaps are hilarious.)

The audition process is basically a head-to-head competition against the other submitters. The powers that be must have liked me, because I got a first-round bye. Now, I’m counting on your help to get past Round 2.

Head over to this page and vote for my recap of Wife Swap! You have to sign up for a message board account, but you love me that much, don’t you? I thought so. Now get to it!

(from Daily 5)

How a character handles a given object can be immensely revealing. Briefly describe, as specifically as you can, how the following characters would handle a pencil:

• a harried middle aged librarian named Greta Hurleyburton

Wears one over each ear and is constantly sharpening them with old-school crank sharpener mounted on her desk

• an elderly lawyer named Gregory Wooster IV

Imports handcrafted koa wood pencils from Argentina and keeps them in a humidor on his desk. Uses special Amazon rubber eraser and sharpens with a pocketknife (he likes to whittle also)

• a ten year old boy named Bruce

gets the big fat sparkly ones in 20-packs for pencil fighting, and trades them for candy

• a purple-haired installation artist who signs her work “Ahn R Keyy”

Sticks pencils in the eyes and private parts of mannequins as a theme. Makes pencil pincushions out of dolls of certain political figures.

Prompt: Write something that incorporates a squid, a lampshade and the smell of burning tortillas.

Another tantrum, sure enough. This one’s a doozy. The house shakes with the screaming. I pause in my dinner prep, trying to muster the intestinal fortitude necessary to ignore the assault on my ears. You know that chemical that causes the feeling of stress, the one I can’t think of right now because I’m too stressed out? Yeah, that one. I’m up to my eyeballs in it. What’s that crash from the vicinity of the living room? I run in to check. She threw her stuffed squid at the lamp and knocked it over. The lamp is fine, but the lampshade, the one that my wife found for $1.50 at Michaels and spent an hour painting dots on, is toast. The metal ring tore right out of the cheap paper shade material. I can’t wait to hear what she’s going to say about this. Not the toddler, the wife. The toddler is making her views clearly felt right now. As I wonder how the afternoon could get any worse, I realize that the new smell is that of my tortillas burning in the toaster oven.

By now you’ve heard that Copyblogger’s Twitter Writing Contest is over, if you were following it. Of the dozens of prizes handed out, the best prize was unexpected: the winners scored a mention in the LA Times. Talk about instant exposure.

Instead of wasting time wondering how close I came, I’m following a tip from screenwriter John August (via Daring Fireball): take a good piece and reverse engineer it. “Think of yourself as an ordinary mechanic given the task of reverse-engineering a spaceship,” he says. “Figure out what the pieces do, and why they were put together in that way.”

First Place

“Time travel works!” the note read. “However you can only travel to the past and one-way.” I recognized my own handwriting and felt a chill. (Ron Gould)

This one has a perfect three-act structure. The first three words are a killer hook. The second sentence sets up the conflict, the third brings it home. It makes me wonder where the narrator found the note, and what happened to him or her — in the future, in the past, whenever. First through third place all made great use of the last-sentence twist.

Second Place

Tony was a snitch, so I wasn’t surprised when his torso turned up in the river. What did surprise me, though, was where they found his head. (Anthony Juliano)

“Tony was a snitch” — again with the hook. You know exactly what’s coming when you read those four words. But you want to know who had Tony whacked and, of course, where they found that head. Also, what’s the narrator’s relationship to Tony? I believe someone commented that this one would make a great novel opener.

Third Place

When Gibson hit that homerun in the fall of eighty-eight, my old man had never been so happy. He hugged me for the first time. I was eleven. (Thelonius Monk)

This one is my favorite. It packs so much tone and character into a small space — you can almost see the sepia photograph. You get everything you need to know about the relationship between the narrator and his father. It’s economical and understated. Contrast the laconic bittersweetness of this one with the emotional tempest in the next one…

Honorable Mention 1

Happily sobbing she held the boy, her memory of his violent conception falling away. She had learned to love him, this would be her revenge. (Melissa Pierce)

This one hits pretty hard and never lets up. “Happily sobbing”, “violent conception” and “revenge” are tempered by “she had learned to love him” — a triumph of will over emotion. I have to take a couple of points off for a missing comma after “sobbing” and a misplaced one in the last sentence (it should be a semicolon or a dash).

Honorable Mention 2

The priest at the funeral home asked if she had been a loving mother. The children all stared at each other. The silence spoke volumes. (Derek)

My second favorite. Death and mommy issues are always good material. At first it seemed to me that “at the funeral home” could be cut without taking anything away from the story, but I think the word “funeral” in the first sentence is necessary to set the mood.

Congratulations to all the winners! I’ll be stalking you all on Twitter soon.

At last, an opportunity to redeem all the literary mojo I’ve spent on Twitter! Copyblogger is running a Twitter writing contest.

Here’s my entry:

He hunched by the bar phone, randomly dialing lipstick numbers from the dingy mirror nearby. On his last quarter, a familiar voice: “Ernie?”

“Joan here. A meteor just landed in my yard.”

“A what?”

“You know, one of those rocks from space. It’s right out in my front yard. I’m lucky it missed my mailbox.”

“Joan, aren’t those things, like, dangerous? And hot and stuff?”

“Well, I heard this ripping noise, there was a flash, and then a noise like thunder. I thought there was an earthquake or someone’s gas grill had blown up or something. But I looked outside and there was this fire in my front yard, and a big hole the size of my coffee table.”

Against the background hum and hiss of the children, the bird and monkey calls were bright clear notes tapped out on a piano.

Something I heard Jared Axelrod talk about in an I Should Be Writing interview: publish some kind of daily project. I do the Daily 5 thing, and some free writing, and every once in awhile if everything else is off my plate I pull out a short story — but I don’t put anything in front of you guys (both of you that are still here) with any regularity. My blocker on that is ideas. I’d love to post every day, but I can’t think of an idea worth sharing every day. More like every month, lately.

So Jared’s idea was just to take something, anything, you wrote today, pick out the best sentence or two, and throw it up there. It’s a nice compromise between posting a bunch of drivel every day and, well, never posting. So I think I’ll try that. Here’s one for today. It’s still early, so maybe this will be motivation to try and come up with something better later on.

(Bonus points if you can figure out who she is.)

Someone in a headset and clipboard was motioning at Tonya to come out to the counter. The gussied-up woman was waiting there, head tilted, studying her like a cat. “Good morning ma’am, can I get you something?”

The catlike expression vanished, replaced by a flash of annoyance and then a big, cartoonish expression of surprise. Tonya saw her glance at the nearest camera and understood. She’s playing for them. “My Dear Tonya Brown!” she pronounced. Tonya heard the capital letters.

OK, I promise this is the last Daily 5 you’ll get for awhile, but this one was too much fun not to share. My answers in italics.

Try concocting euphemisms for the following:

- candy for breakfast
Carb preloading

- a defective tricycle
training jalopy

- a gas guzzler
Carbon surplus

- a ridiculously big bouffant hairdo
luxuriant extra body

- unemployed
dilettante

- painted the wrong color
chromatic liberties were taken

- a stolen election / ballot stuffing
democratic correction

- excessive redtape
bureaucratic aid program

- a cover-up of heinous corruption
minimizing unintended consequences

- the dog peed on the carpet
Pet-initiated carpet upgrade

- civil war
intra-state negotiations

- a failing grade
educational incentive

- tax evasion
federal budget reappropriation

- a size too small
athletic fit

- this building could not withstand a minor tremor
green construction

- the living room is the size of a mop closet
efficient use of square footage

I’ve been keeping up my Daily 5 exercises most days, and enjoying it. The exercises are a mix of all kinds of techniques, from character development to plotting to descriptiveness to simple brainstorming. I had fun with the one I did yesterday. Here it is, just because.

Write a brief scene that includes the following:

• a quilt
• the word “quotient”
• a ball of rubber bands
• a morbidly obese hippopotamus
• the perfume of lilies
• the sound of popcorn underfoot

She threw the quilt off her lap. “I’m tired of lying around all weekend like some fat hippo. I’m going to a movie.”

She primped, put on a sundress and plenty of makeup, and gave herself a good dose of lily-scented perfume. Her husband watched meekly, picking at his prized ball of rubber bands with one hand while scribbling on tax forms with the other. “Divide the value in box 6A by the number of dependents… enter the quotient in box 12C…” he muttered, not entirely to himself.

She rolled her eyes and headed to the door. She could already smell the popcorn and hear it crunching under her pedicured, sandaled feet. She was free.