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powerandmagic · 5 years

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MAÑANA: Latinx Comics From the 25th Century is now open for submissions.

[Noten: Toda esta información también está disponible en español a pedido.]

"In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed to the islands of the Caribbean. That single event led to the radical transformation of the region, the hemisphere, and eventually the entire world.

Indigenous peoples were decimated. Lands were colonized. African peoples were displaced and enslaved. Race, as a concept, took root. Black women and indigenous women were subjugated. Cultures died, fused, changed, and were, sometimes, reborn. Art, music, foods, and faiths echoed these tangled pasts. Immigrants from across the planet flocked to the newly christened "Latin America." A caste system based on race and color reigned. Liberation struggles were fought. Revolutions were won. Wars of independence were waged. Coups were orchestrated. Global capitalism ran amok, fueling the mass exodus... And we survived it all.

That all seems so far away now."

MAÑANA: Latinx Comics From the 25th Century is a speculative fiction comics anthology set throughout Latin America in the 2490s, roughly one thousand years from the voyage that changed the world. It took 500 years to get us where we are now -- where could 500 more take us?

Submission Period

Submissions will be open to the public from May 27th - July 7th, 2019 (11:59 PM Pacific Time).

Who Can Participate

To pitch a story to MAÑANA, you must be Latinx or Latin American. We define Latinx as "a person living outside of Latin America whose cultural background includes any of the Spanish, Portuguese, or French-colonized countries of the Americas and the Caribbean." We define Latin American as anyone born, raised, and currently living in any of those same countries.

You may pitch as a SOLO CREATOR (making the whole comic by yourself), as a WRITER ONLY (story writer who we will pair with an artist), or as an ARTIST ONLY (a comics artist who we will pair with a script).

Solo Creators with a strong story idea but not-as-strong artwork may receive an offer to be paired with a different artist (vice versa for pitches with stronger art than story).

"Writers Only" may request to be paired with a specific artist. The artist they request must be someone they know for a fact is filling out the "Artist Only" submission form. The reverse applies to "Artists Only" requesting a specific writer.

Age Restrictions

All contributors must be 18 years of age or older. All content must be suitable for readers as young as 14 years old.

Specifications

Comics from 2 - 12 pages long (must be an even number)

6.625” x 10.25” trim size (template will be provided)

Bleed? Yes.

Black & White, or Grayscale (no screen tones)

600 dpi

.PSD final files

Timeline

Selection Process (May 2019 - Aug 2019)

Open Submissions: 5.27 - 7.07 (6 weeks)

Selection Period: 7.08 - 7.28 (3 weeks)

Acceptance Emails & Feedback: 7.29 - 8.08 (1 week)

Paperwork: 8.09 - 8.15 (1 week)

Creation Period (Apr 2019 - Sep 2019)

Script: 8.16 - 9.15 (4 weeks)

Feedback/Edits: 9.16 - 9.29 (2 weeks)

Thumbnails: 9.30 - 10.20 (3 weeks)

Feedback/Edits: 10.21 - 11.03 (2 weeks)

Pencils: 11.04 - 12.15 (6 weeks)

Feedback/Edits: 12.16 - 12.29 (2 weeks)

Inks: 12.30 - 1.26 (4 weeks)

Feedback/Edits: 1.27 - 2.09 (2 weeks)

Toning & Shading: 2.10 - 3.01 (3 weeks)

Feedback/Edits: 3.10 - 3.15 (2 weeks)

Lettering: 3.16 - 4.05 (3 weeks)

Feedback/Edits: 4.06 - 4.19 (2 weeks)

Final Files Due: May 3rd, 2020

Kickstarter (May 2020)

Payment (June 2020)

Compensation

Contributors will be compensated at a rate of $107/page plus any Kickstarter bonuses unlocked through stretch goals. Contributors also receive a minimum of 10 complimentary copies of the anthology, royalties on all digital sales proportionate to their page-count contribution, and royalties on any future print runs of the anthology after the first printing sells out.

"Writers Only" will receive $42/page, with bonuses, comp copies, and royalties split evenly between themselves and their artist.

"Artists Only" will receive $65/page, with bonuses, comp copies, and royalties split evenly between themselves and their writer.

All contributors have the right to purchase additional copies of the anthology at 50% off the cover price for as long as the anthology is in print.

Rights

Creators will cede exclusive first worldwide print and digital rights to their stories for a full calendar year from the date of publication, and non-exclusive worldwide print and digital rights (in both the English and Spanish languages) in perpetuity. Ownership remains with the creators.

What We WANT:

Comics (not illustrations, not prose, not poetry).

Previously unpublished stories.

The protagonist (or POV character) must be Latinx or Latin American.

Writers who have a connection to the country they choose as their setting (either from there, born there, parents or grandparents born there, lived there for many years, etc.)

Speculative fiction: How has technology changed? How has society changed? How have politics changed? The natural world? Fashion? The thoughtfulness of your world building will make or break your pitch.

Informed fiction: We want stories whose ideas about the future are rooted in an understanding of the past and present. For example: we're less interested in whether flying cars exist and more interested in whether the Amazon rain forest makes a full recovery (and what that means for Brazil).

Optimism: your vision of 25th century Latin America doesn't need to be utopic (although it can be) as long as themes of improvement, empowerment, growth, or problem-solving predominate.

Peaceful stories, sad stories, triumphant stories, funny stories, failure stories, action stories, philosophical stories, love stories -- the full spectrum of humanity is welcome. The catch: it must end “positively.” Everything doesn’t have to work out, but we prefer stories end on a note of hope, new understandings, resilience, etc.

What We DON’T Want:

No fan works. No auto-bio. No prose. No one-off illustrations.

Comics that are already finished or that you’ve already started drawing.

Hacking the Mainframe: Unless you really, really think you can "WOW!" us with a highly original take, avoid "hackers take down the mega corporation" as a plot (because it's been done to death).

Fantasy: We want science fiction and/or speculative fiction based in the real physical laws of our universe. However, certain elements of magic realism can work for us (e.g. in an otherwise realistic setting, a character speaks to a long departed ancestor, experiences old gods in a vision, or watches their life unfold out of sequence).

Ahistorical Takes: any stories that erase, deny, or revise the real-world histories of Latin American peoples will be rejected.

Horror: Your story can use fear and danger as plot elements, but if instilling fear/existential dread in the reader is the overarching goal, this is the wrong anthology.

Cursing is permitted as long as words aren’t used literally (i.e. “Shit, you scared me!” as opposed to “Let’s go shit in the woods!”) and are used very sparingly when used at all. In general, we’d prefer not.

No porn. No references to specific sexual acts. No explicit nudity whether sexual or non-sexual (sorry, folks). “Consensual fade-to-black sex between legal adults” is fine.

No depictions of abuse (sexual, physical, psychological) whether pictorial or written. Characters may vaguely reference (in non-graphic language) abuse that they have suffered in the past if doing so serves the story or is integral to the character.

No gore. People can get hurt, bleed, die, etc, but not in a grossly over-the-top way that fetishizes violence.

No slurs, no racist statements nor imagery, no misogyny, no transphobia, no ableism, no xenophobia, and no white supremacist nonsense in general. Since this anthology is about Latin America's future, these topics can be broached in your story, but we urge you to tackle such subjects in a more creative way than "[insert drawing of some guy yelling a slur]."

Ready to pitch?

"SOLO CREATORS" APPLY HERE.

"WRITERS ONLY" APPLY HERE.

"ARTISTS ONLY" APPLY HERE.

Here’s what you’ll need to complete each form:

SOLO CREATORS:

A working title and page count for your comic (doesn’t have to be exact).

A synopsis of your story, including a beginning, middle, and end. Spoil everything, but try to keep it under 300 words.

Preliminary sketches associated with your pitch: character ideas, environment concepts (the latter is especially important if your portfolio lacks strong examples of background art), etc. These don’t need to be final or polished pieces! Just clear enough to give us an idea.

Links to any relevant publishing credits. Self-published works and webcomics count as credits! Choose examples that best reflect the style you intend to use for this comic. You may simply include a link to your portfolio if you have no pre-existing credits, but please note that folks with sequential storytelling examples will receive preference.

Tell us about yourself, your cultural and creative background, and why you want to be in MAÑANA. Short and sweet is best!

WRITERS ONLY:

A working title and page count for your comic (doesn’t have to be exact).

A synopsis of your story, including a beginning, middle, and end. Spoil everything, but try to keep it under 300 words.

Links to any relevant publishing credits. Self-published works and webcomics count as credits! You may simply include a link to your writing portfolio if you have no pre-existing comics writing credits, but note that folks with comics writing experience will receive preference.

Tell us about yourself, your cultural and creative background, and why you want to be in MAÑANA. Short and sweet is best!

ARTISTS ONLY:

Links to your portfolio and/or any relevant publishing credits. Self-published works and webcomics count as credits! You may simply include a link to your portfolio if you have no pre-existing credits, but please note that folks with sequential storytelling examples will receive preference.

Tell us about yourself, your cultural and artistic background, and why you want to be in MAÑANA. Short and sweet is best!

More Questions?

Check out the FAQ. If your answer isn’t there, Ask away!

#mañana anthology #latinx #comics #latino #latina #latin america #paid #power and magic

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artificialqueens · 7 years

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In Sickness and In Health Ch4 - shalaska - pureCAMP

A/N - okay, here goes.

first of all, i officially dedicate this chapter to my bosom buddy, partner in crime, grandma and best friend, nymph. being your friend is the only christmas present i could ask for, so here’s a christmas gift to you for being so amazing. although it’s not christmas yet, merry christmas to you

that being said, there’s so many more people i wish i could write for, unfortunately i have lots of friends and little time. so for now, all of my love and the happiest christmas wishes go out to wick and frida, dottie, ortega, fudge/nugget, luci, ace, rosie, jazz - really just all of you who have made a positive impact on my life. merry christmas to all of you <3

As expected, the palace in which Prince Ron brought them to was just as extravagant as Sharon’s, but not nearly as tasteful. Alaska found herself cringing slightly at the decor, a sentiment which Sharon echoed with her raised eyebrows. It was too colourful, too overwhelmed with gold and silver and bronze, too shiny and gaudy and clashing.

Prince Ron led them out of the grand front room into the even larger, even more decorated throne room, where he spread his arms wide with a flourish. Despite how tacky yet expensive it looked, Alaska still took it all in. At the top of the room, positioned in the centre on a curved balcony, there stood a large gilded throne, cushioned with fine red velvet. Next to it, a smaller, more slender throne stood – this one purple, edged with silver.

“Welcome back to mi casa!” He announced. “That’s French for my home.”

“No it’s –” Sharon began, but of course, the prince simply wasn’t listening. It seemed he had a habit of only acknowledging Sharon’s presence – Alaska was invisible once more – and not even listening to her when she spoke. No wonder Sharon hadn’t fallen for his supposed charm.

“See that throne up there?” Prince Ron asked, heavily draping his arm around Sharon’s slender shoulders. The force of it roughly pulled their hands apart, and Sharon almost buckled from the sudden weight on her. She was growing weaker, but Alaska knew she was doing her best to hide it.

Sharon followed his eye line. “The red one?”

He chuckled heartily. “Oh, Sharon, you jest! No, the smaller, feminine one in purple. You see it?”

“Yes.”

Prince Ron clapped Sharon on the back; yet another overly-masculine gesture that Sharon struggled to ignore. “Do you like it? After all, I’m sure it one day will be yours. You will be a wonderful queen for our kingdoms, Sharon.”

Sharon hummed, all the while shooting glances at Alaska. “I think I prefer the red.”

The prince laughed again. “When did you become so comedic? Prefer the red? Genius!” He wiped a tear from his eye. “Well, we all know red is the colour of kings, it certainly isn’t for women!”

Alaska tuned out of his pompous voice, scowling as she thought of Sharon’s penchant for red lipstick. Not for women, my ass, she thought to herself.

“I mean, could you imagine? The audacity of treating a woman in such a way! Oh, and speaking of-”

He took a deep breath, ready to perform another dreadfully heartfelt soliloquy. His hand moved to place itself above his heart.

“My, oh my, how it feels so terrible!” Prince Ron lamented. “To give a weapon to a woman! Sharon, how can I live with myself, knowing that by giving you a weapon I’m opening you up to attack? As a man – no, as a gentleman, a prince, a courtier, it is my chivalrous duty to protect a fine lady such as yourself!”

Sharon mimed gagging in Alaska’s direction, clearly unimpressed with his antics. “This fine lady doesn’t need protecting. I’m more open to attack if I don’t have a weapon, Ron. I…” She paused, as though the words were painful. “I need your help.”

Those were the fatal words. Alaska could see it was killing Sharon to say them, but they had the desired effect. Ever the desperately traditional hero, Prince Ron was taken by them immediately.

“What kind of future king would I be, not to help a lady in need? Sharon, of course I’ll help you. If you won’t accept my company, I may as well bestow upon you some of the finest weaponry I have in my possession. Come this way.”

-0-

Unsurprisingly, Alaska was forced to wait outside as the weapon dealing took place. It made sense; regardless of how close her and Sharon were becoming, she had to remember that Sharon was a member of the royal family, not any regular girl. That was why she needed to keep both her behaviour and her heart in check. Sharon was a princess. Alaska was nothing.

Before long, one of the many women in the palace walked past Alaska, doubling back once she realized she didn’t recognise her face. The woman was well-dressed, with kind eyes and a large ring weighing down one of her fingers. At Alaska’s polite smile, she struck up a conversation.

“Sorry dear, I don’t believe we’ve met before?”

Her voice was rich and smooth. Alaska’s own accent sounded horribly common in comparison.

“No, my name’s Alaska and I’m accompanying the Princess Sharon on her travels. She’s just speaking to Prince Ron.”

The woman nodded thoughtfully. “A lovely girl, really. Ever so intelligent. She’ll make a remarkable queen.”

Alaska’s heart swelled, though she tried to ignore it. “I completely agree. She’s going to be amazing when her time comes.”

A sudden sense of trepidation washed over her, cold dread beginning to trickle down her system. She refrained from speaking the awful truth that had entered her mind.

If her time comes.

It was a very real possibility that Sharon would never be Queen. It was a very real possibility that the kingdom would never gather with high spirits to watch their young princess ascend to her throne, each one of them feeling pride as though she were a member of their own family. There wouldn’t be a day off in which the streets would be adorned in colourful banners, in which traditional dances would take place in the square and in which people would drink and laugh and eat cake. There wouldn’t be groups of women discussing the coronation dress, nor groups of men wondering who will be lucky enough to take her hand in marriage.

It was a very real possibility that the kingdom would fall into mourning. It was a very real possibility that they would gather with low spirits at the bottom of the palace steps, laying down flowers in memory of the beloved princess who was gone too soon. There would be a day off in order for the funeral procession to take place, with the casket containing the body of a girl who had barely lived. There would be an influx in the demand for black clothing, and no one would be seen not paying their respects to the late princess in their finest mourning wear.

Alaska only noticed she had welled up when the woman before her asked if she was okay, and she realized that her form was now blurry with tears. Quickly blinking them away, she forced out a little laugh and nodded.

“I spaced out a little then, whoops. I’ve been waiting a while.” She gestured back to where Prince Ron and Sharon had disappeared to.

The woman nodded understandingly. “Well, would you like to follow me to our library? I was looking for somebody to help me pick my next novel.”

Eager to move away from the doorway, Alaska agreed. As it turned out, the library was equally as grand as the rest of the palace, but in much better taste. Grecian architecture was prevalent throughout, with high arches and friezes of old gods and colonnades separating the different sections. It was stunning.

For at least twenty minutes, Alaska perused the shelves, gently stroking the leather-bound spines of the books and tracing the intricate pictures with the tip of her finger. She was sure the stories inside were as wonderful as the illustrations, and longed to be somebody who could read them. Her imagination could never do them justice.

“Alaska, dear, which novel do you think I should read next?”

The woman had laid out a selection of six books on one of the large tables, and seemed to be unable to make up her mind. Alaska studied each one, wishing again that she was able to read the titles. She hadn’t the faintest idea what any of them said, or would be about. She hadn’t read a book in her life.

“Uh… that one.” She decided eventually.

The woman smiled. “Any particular reason why?”

Alaska shrugged truthfully. “The pictures are really pretty.”

As soon as the words had left her lips, she cursed herself. Really? You’re in a palace full of well-educated people and you’re talking about pretty pictures?

To her surprise, the woman laughed heartily. “I like the way you think! Good pictures can make or break a story, in my opinion.”

At that, she turned around and started to put the other books back onto the shelf, climbing onto the wheeled ladder and turning her back on Alaska. Before she could properly respond, the door to the library forcefully slammed open, hitting the wall with an almighty bang. She whipped around, heart racing from the momentary shock, and spotted Prince Ron entering the room in long strides, with a hopeless-looking Sharon following him.

“Mother!” Prince Ron announced.

“Queen Ellena?” Sharon asked.

“Shit.” Alaska murmured.

She scurried to Sharon’s side as they approached the ladder in which the Queen was stood, her skin blushing as the situation dawned on her. This was the actual queen of the kingdom, Prince Ron’s mother – head of the royal family! And she, Alaska, had just been chatting away with zero knowledge.

“My apologies!” Alaska stuttered, sweeping into a clumsy curtsey as Sharon did the same, but tidier. “I-I wasn’t aware it was you, Y-Your Hi-”

The Queen waved her away, laughing gently. “Nonsense, both of you. I have no need to be Queen when I’m inside the palace walls, just call me Ellena. And none of this curtseying business!”

Sharon smiled. “It’s lovely to see you, Ellena. I was wondering if I may borrow some of your books for my journey? I’ll make sure they’re returned.”

Two things struck Alaska; one of them was that Sharon spoke differently to others – be it royalty or not – than she did to Alaska, and the other was her phrasing. I’ll make sure they’re returned. Even Sharon was all too aware that her survival was looking bleak. She wasn’t going to kid around and pretend like everything was fine.

“Of course, my dear! You’re welcome here anytime you like.”

Sharon was quick in her selection, which Alaska was endlessly grateful for. She was still a little embarrassed that she hadn’t known who the Queen was, and the presence of Prince Ron was making her far too uncomfortable to want to stay any longer. Goodness only knew how Sharon had coped speaking with him alone for the amount of time that she had.

“Alaska, do you have any you want to look at?” Sharon carefully stowed three books into her bag, looking up at her with earnest eyes.

She shook her head, her throat closing up. “I…” Alaska practically whispered. “I can’t read.”

Luckily for Alaska, Sharon didn’t visibly react; if she had it would have only added to the inappropriate sense of shame that came over her as soon as she spoke. Who cared if she couldn’t read? Most of their kingdom couldn’t, save for a few who had access to books and education. There was no need to be embarrassed!

Only Alaska was no longer in the company of their citizens anymore. She was in a palace, where everybody could read and write perfectly and had endless stories stored in their minds from years of pages turned and pictures looked at. In this scenario, she was the odd one out.

Sharon nodded quietly, not drawing attention to Alaska as she took one final book, thicker than the rest, from the shelf and slotted it into her bag.

“We really should be off,” Sharon spoke louder than before, causing both Ron and the Queen to look at her. “Thank you ever so much for the hospitality.”

The Queen frowned. “Won’t you stay to eat?”

Biting her lip, Sharon shook her head and politely declined. Alaska was sure they were both thinking of the debacle that had taken place in the palace back at home, with Sharon’s coughing and sickness and the bad temper that had upset the delicate balance of the dinner table. Neither of them wanted a repeat of that to be witnessed.

Eventually the Queen accepted that they wouldn’t stay, and before they could even turn around, Prince Ron insisted he would walk them back through the kingdom, keeping them safe until they reached their carriage. Again, neither of them wanted it – but at the same time, it reduced Alaska’s worry that someone would attack them. The last thing Sharon needed was someone trying to overpower her, especially when it seemed that a single breath of wind could do the job.

At the edge of the kingdom, a five minute walk from where their carriage was waiting for them, Prince Ron stopped.

“Dearest Sharon, this is as far as I am permitted to take you – but do not look glum. One day I shall take you around the whole world. For now, however, I must bid you adieu.”

He took hold of one of her hands, stroking her pale skin. It was a wonder he didn’t notice how skeletal her fingers were, her vivid the veins were.

“Even in the shortest window of time, your presence has the most profound effect on the heart. Until next time.”

It seemed as though Alaska blinked and all of a sudden he was kissing her, tilting her face upwards with his hand to meet his superior height. Though she made no attempt to pull away, Sharon’s nose was wrinkled, one of her hands balled into a fist as she tried to endure it.

Alaska sharply turned away from the two, sucking in a deep breath as her eyesight grew blurry. No matter where she looked, she could see them. The floor, her hands, her feet, imprinted everywhere was that horrible image, the silhouette of his lips against hers and his hands holding her face. I hate this. I hate this I hate this I hate this.

She tried everything. She was upset because she hated Prince Ron, and he didn’t deserve to be kissing someone as wonderful as Sharon. No. She was upset because Sharon was her friend, and she knew Sharon didn’t want to be with him. No. She was upset because… because…

No.

Never.

There’s Prince Ron’s voice. “Take care.”

Sharon. “We will.”

Prince Ron. “Goodbye, Sharon.”

Then footsteps. Alaska turned to find Prince Ron retreating, his back to them, slowly disappearing out of sight. As soon as he was gone, no longer in earshot or visible to either of them, Sharon doubled over and started to cough.

The action was so violent-sounding that Alaska was genuinely afraid she would fall over from the force of it. It was obscenely loud, racking her entire body as she shuddered and hacked. Amongst the horrid sound was a faint rattle, that could only be described as the death rattle of someone who was toeing the line between living and dying. Sharon had gone so long without coughing, presumably suppressing it so she didn’t cause alarm in the palace, and this seemed to be the result. Either that, or – as much as Alaska’s heart ached at the thought – she was simply getting worse.

By the time the fit was over, the grass and worn path were splattered with thick, dark globs of blood, as was Sharon’s chin. With the sleeve of her robe she quickly removed it, her chest heaving as she panted to catch her breath. Each inhalation was wheezy and shallow.

“C-Carriage.” She managed, clutching Alaska’s hand as tightly as she could and stumbling forwards. Her grip was loose – far too loose. Alaska held tight to compensate.

“A-At l-l-least-” Sharon tried again, every word seeming to drain her. “N-No-No-Not f-far…”

With that, her legs gave out beneath her, and she tumbled to the floor. Alaska’s heart leapt as the princess fell, hitting the ground hard and making no attempt to hold her arms out to cushion her fall. She simply took the impact with her body, not even trying to stand up once she’d fallen down. She was far too weak to do that.

“Sharon!” Alaska cried out, lifting the princess into her arms. It was terrifying how light she was, but thankfully it meant that Alaska could carry her, and quickly. She made her way back to the carriage as fast as she possibly could, gently setting her down and promising she’d be back soon.

“Onward,” She breathed to the driver. “Go!”

They took off like a shot; Alaska barely had time to clamber inside before the horses were whinnying and the carriage began to hurtle off the track they had been parked on and away from the village. Inside, Sharon was still in the exact position that Alaska had set her down in, unchanged.

She tried to lift her hand, succeeding in moving it an inch or two before it fell again. “W-Water… b-b-better…”

Alaska scrambled for the water, pouring some out of one of the bottles they had into a small cup. Clearly Sharon wasn’t strong enough to hold it, so she shifted forwards and held it to Sharon’s lips, tilting it slowly to allow her to have little sips at a time. Her breathing began to slow, her chest settling as she relaxed back into the carriage.

“Th-Thank you.” She spoke up, this time clearer and less shaky. “C-Can I?”

Despite the vicious trembling of her hands, Sharon succeeded in drinking a little more water, only spilling a few drops down her front in the process. It was the least of her worries, in any case. Her strength was beginning to return, bit by bit.

“C-Can you tell the driver to st-stop when it’s night? I’d r-rather sleep like th-that.”

Alaska nodded, her heart sinking as she gazed into Sharon’s tired eyes. “Of course,” She promised, beginning to lean out of the carriage once again. “Anything for you.”

-0-

Things were quiet for a good few hours after the carriage continued away from the kingdom. It was still late morning when they had set off, and the comfortable silence allowed Sharon to regenerate her strength and energy without feeling too under pressure to prove that she was okay. In the meantime, Alaska alternated between looking out of the window and checking up on Sharon. Outside, the view had finally started to change, and the endless stream of trees and green grass and hedges finally started to make way for ocean views and sand as they approached the coastline. Having never been to the beach, Alaska was sincerely fascinated by it all. Opposite her, Sharon didn’t change all too much. She sat up a little straighter after a few hours, and her eyes started to look a little brighter, and she began to look more alive and awake than she had before, but that was mostly it.

It was nearing dusk when the silence between the two was breached; the carriage had just stopped, and Alaska had been gazing out of the window for far too long, urging Sharon to look too. It was as if the world around them was rearranging itself, transitioning from blue to gold, rose, violet, thousands of colours streaking across the sky. Far off to the west, the sun was sinking lower and lower into the horizon.

The two got out of the carriage, desperate to stretch their legs after so long of sitting down. Alaska wisely grabbed one of the blankets from the bench she was sitting on, carrying it with her and setting it down on the sand so her and Sharon could sit. There wasn’t much space on the blanket, so they had to sit close in order to be free of the invasive sand. Sharon didn’t seem to mind, and Alaska’s heart was pounding.

“I used to do this a lot. Just staring at the sunset from my bedroom window. I had this amazing view of the entire kingdom and a little further beyond.” Sharon told her. Her voice was tinged with what sounded like bittersweet memories.

Alaska bit her lip. “Ever been to the beach?”

Sharon nodded. “Yeah. Some of my dad’s business things were more vacations than they were business. He’d only really be in meetings for an hour a day, and then we could go out and do whatever we wanted. I used to build sandcastles with Adore and help her dip her toes into the sea.”

She sighed. “When I got sick, it ruined everything for everyone. My dad went to business alone. We weren’t allowed on vacation at all. Not even my mom and my sisters without me. I think Laila resents me for that.”

“That’s not fair.” Alaska frowned. “You couldn’t help getting sick.”

Sharon snorted mirthlessly. “I guess that’s true. Although, being at the beach after so many years away feels like I’m ticking off some kind of bucket list.”

For a moment, Alaska wondered briefly about her own bucket list. Dying hadn’t really crossed her mind before, save for some of the less-plentiful harvests that impacted her grumbling tummy come wintertime. Death just seemed far away, like an inevitable but not so imposing raincloud of a distant storm. It was as probable as birth but it didn’t really mean anything to Alaska. The only real significance it held was that her parents had passed, and one day she would cross over and be with them. It was comforting, at least, to know they were there.

Sharon didn’t have anyone waiting for her. Alaska’s heart broke as she thought about how it must feel, to be young and already facing Death’s cruel penance. She was essentially staring her fate in the face knowing she was walking into it blind and alone.

“Lasky.” Sharon said suddenly, with urgency. “Come in the sea with me.”

Alaska did a double take. “Huh? Why?”

“Think about it!” Sharon replied, almost gleefully. “This is it, for me. This journey is live or die. If I live, I want good memories. If I die, I want to go out knowing I had some fun. This is the bucket list trip, the end of life checklist. Please?”

Slowly climbing to her feet, Alaska grinned. “Last one to the sea is a rotten egg.”

They instantly took off down the sand, Alaska reaching the waves far before Sharon did. Even so, Sharon was running, and Alaska’s heart felt as though it was swelling up just watching her. She’d discarded her hooded robe, and was running with her skirt clutched in her hands to allow for easier movement. As soon as she caught up, she grabbed Alaska’s hand without a second thought and willed her to run further into the freezing sea.

“STOP!” Alaska giggled, screeching as the cold water lapped about her ankles. Sharon did the same, performing a strange jumpy dance as she squealed and ended up splashing more than she spared. “LET’S JUMP OVER THE WAVES!”

The wind started to pick up, but it wasn’t like it mattered. Both girls were cold already, the water now up to the tops of their shins and still icy.

Hours could have passed in which they were simply fooling around. They jumped over waves, until a piece of seaweed wrapped itself around Sharon’s foot and caused her to scream and jump directly into Alaska’s arms, which was succeeded by a laughing fit which caused Alaska to drop her directly into an oncoming wave, and in turn caused her to laugh so much that she, too, was suddenly soaked in sea water. They splashed one another, flinging great big handfuls of icy spray in the others direction and shrieking madly at the cold. Somehow time passed without their notice, with the silly games and endless enjoyment masking the change from the warm colours of the evening to the cool, dark purples and indigos of the night. By the time they stopped, their hair was ragged and drenched, their clothes were soaked, and both girls were shivering with chattering teeth.

They had ended up facing each other, the seawater just above their knees, positively shaking in the biting wind. Alaska noted a tear in Sharon’s eye, though whether it was from laughter, cold or sadness, she didn’t know.

“ALASKA!” She shouted over the wind, more tears gathering in her eyes. Gosh, those eyes. Nothing looked prettier in the moonlight than they did.

“YES?” Alaska shouted back, taking both of Sharon’s numb hands in her own.

“I DON’T WANT TO DIE!” She yelled. Though her voice was hard to distinguish, it sounded heartbroken. “I DON’T WANT TO DIE! I DON’T WANT TO DIE!”

Alaska teared up instantly, and surged forward to tightly embrace Sharon. Both of them were trembling violently, but Alaska clutched her tight to her chest as though she were a lifeline.

“I don’t want to die!” She sobbed brokenly into Alaska’s chest. “I don’t, I don’t, I don’t! I never have!”

Despite her best efforts, Alaska found herself crying too. She cradled Sharon’s head, stroking her hair, the sensation of the sea forgotten.

“I don’t want you to go either. Please, please, please don’t go. You can’t go yet. You can’t leave me. I…”

Sharon lifted her tear-stained face to look up at Alaska.

“I love you.”

The sky was black. The sea was cold. The moon was bright. The poor girl was living. The princess was dying. And the two lovers, entwined and drenched and crying as though the world was ending, kissed on the beach.

#purecamp #in sickness and in health #shalaska #sharon needles #alaska thunderfuck #rpdr fanfiction #submission #lesbian au #royalty au

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beautymouth72-blog · 5 years

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From the Edge of the World: An Interview with Brian Phillips

DECEMBER 9, 2018

HOW DO PEOPLE find meaning — in their history, in their community, in the landscape around them? Brian Phillips has traveled untold distances in search of an answer to this question, but he never quite figures it out. He knows he can’t, and that’s part of the fun. Instead, the essays documenting his journeys embrace the messiness and complexity of this world, and he operates with an enthusiastic resignation to the unknowable.

Phillips is eager to cut into the unknown, not in order to understand it, but rather to arrive at even greater questions and deeper mysteries — the good stuff. The essays in his first collection, Impossible Owls, take him to oddities at the edges of our understanding, as far as Russia and India, and back in time into the archives of his hometown of Ponca City, Oklahoma. Unbeholden to any sort of tidy knowing, Phillips follows the most absurd, tragic, and compelling elements of his subjects wherever they lead. His essays dig their way down determinedly and wind their way unpredictably, like a cross-examination at the hands of a relentlessly curious, self-aware, and hilarious interrogator.

The collection contains eight essays, four of which are previously published but freshly revised. Collections are often called “wide ranging,” but almost never do they span such topics as, among other things, the Iditarod, sumo wrestling, the great Russian animator Yuri Norstein, and the British royal family. Taken together, this energetic and imaginative collection highlights the strange and nonsensical corners of our world that sit beyond our line of sight.

ISAAC LEVY-RUBINETT: The subjects of these essays are all over the place. How do you find topics? At what point does something go from an interesting topic to the focus of an essay?

BRIAN PHILLIPS: That’s probably the hardest part of the whole job for me: knowing what to write about next. Because I do jump all over the place a lot. I find that I have a sort of restless imagination, in the sense that I can get obsessed with a story for a good while but when it’s finished, I don’t want to do more on the same topic. I want to find something entirely different, which is also a virtue I like in essay writing generally. I like essays that go places you aren’t expecting and with spontaneous turns that you didn’t see coming in advance. I really dislike stories that telegraph everything that’s going to happen at the beginning of the piece. So it’s a really unfocused process, of just trying to be open to what comes across my screen.

I got interested in Yuri Norstein, the Russian animator who I wrote about in “The Little Gray Wolf Will Come,” when a friend of mine, who ended up traveling with me to Russia as my translator, sent me a YouTube clip of one of his short films, Hedgehog in the Fog. And I watched it and thought, “That’s cute,” and then didn’t think about him again for two years. And much later, I was on some Wikipedia page about lost movies, movies that had either vanished or never been finished, or might have had canonical importance but that we didn’t have anymore. I was reading through this list and came across Norstein’s “The Overcoat” adaptation, which he’d been working on for 37 years and never managed to finish. And I kind of remembered having seen Hedgehog in the Fog when Alyssa sent it to me a couple of years earlier. And then I just started poking around and reading about him, and it became clear fairly quickly that this was something I wanted to write about. But if I had just clicked three different links that morning, I never would have done the story. I could have gone on to do something completely different. So it’s tenuous. I was speaking to a college class last week, and they asked that question: “How do we find topics?” And I felt really unprepared to advise them on that. I wish I knew, honestly. This is the longest “I don’t know” in the history of interviews.

Most of your essays involve traveling to faraway places and trying to make sense of them. In the final essay, “But Not Like Your Typical Love Story,” you focus your attention on your hometown of Ponca City, Oklahoma. What was it like training your focus on a place to which you have a personal connection?

It was a big change after having done a lot of pieces that involved far-flung travel and immersing myself in worlds that I didn’t know well at all. Like, before I went to Japan, I didn’t really know much about sumo wrestling. So it was definitely a change of mental frame to go into a story where I was partly writing about my own experience and also telling this story of this place that I had known and heard in many iterations since I was a little kid, involving, in some cases, people I had known or seen when I was a child. The main difference was just that I had known about these people for a lot longer and they hit home in a slightly different way for me.

That felt important to me, because the book was about borders and thresholds and places you come to the end of one or another kind of known world. It’s about gaps on the map and boundaries of experience where you don’t know what lies on the other side. So it seems to me that it was necessary to confront my own version of that, which is … instead of going outward, going inward to home and figuring out how history functions in that way.

The Ponca City essay was really important to me for clarifying certain things about the perspective that I brought to other essays in the book. I tend to come at things sideways or from a slightly oblique angle, and a lot of that comes from having grown up in a place that I liked, in many ways, but felt like I didn’t quite fit in. You know, when you grow up in a small town and you feel like you have a different sensibility from the people around you, you are always in a slightly ironic position in your childhood universe. You leave your small town and go to the city, or go somewhere else, trying to find a place where you feel you belong, but then you find that that sideways relationship to things goes with you, and you’re always slightly defining yourself against your surroundings rather than with your surroundings, if that makes sense. This is a common and age-old story, but one that I’ve thought about a lot with respect to my own life. So I felt that going through that Ponca City story was a way to explore that kind of obliquity in a slightly more intimate and personal way than I was able to do when I was in Alaska, or watching The X-Files.

The essays in this collection span six years and two presidencies. What was it like engaging with your older work during our current historical moment?

I certainly wanted the book to speak to the world it was being released in. I wrote my book overlapping the two most recent presidencies, and of course did all of the revising under Trump. I felt, as I went through some of the older essays — this may be sort of writerly thinking, partly because I was writing about small-town Oklahoma and American conspiracy theories, which I’d actually written about under Obama — that they seemed kind of anticipatory. They seemed to fall into the chain of events that ultimately led to Trump. You know, how our dads listened to conspiracy radio in Oklahoma and they played the Rodney King riots on a loop at the pizza place. That was stuff that I’d written about in 2012, but when I was reading it under Trump, it stood out.

When I started revising, I had two options: I could think of these essays as finished works that represented the historical moments when they were published on the internet, or I could think of them as open to revision, and try to shape them for this moment.

From my perspective, it was about trying to make the essays as good as I could, and in some cases that had to do with drawing out some of those trends and parallels. I mostly chose the second course, partly because it’s hard for me not to tinker with my own work if I read something that seems bad. So in some ways I was making this large-scale choice to try to represent the world in 2018 more sagely, but then a lot of it was me being annoyed by stuff I wrote five years ago and wanting to bonk myself in the head because it should sound better.

You often stop short of offering a neat conclusion. Why?

I like things that don’t end in too clean a way. I like essays that leave things a little bit provisional, a little bit more nuanced than they seemed in the beginning. If I write an essay that clearly presents to the reader a situation of incomprehensible complexity, or a situation where knowledge kind of expires in the encounter with complexity, then I feel like that is, for me, often the more valuable kind of writing than essays that explain things, tie things off, and tell you what things mean. I like uncertainty and ambiguity and surprise, as aesthetic features.

I was thinking recently about Montaigne, the French writer who wrote some of the most important early essays. What’s so wonderful about Montaigne’s essays is how spontaneous they are. He’ll be going off on one historical tangent and then pivot halfway through and start talking about something else that seems only distantly connected, and then at the end you get this poetic juxtaposition that is just stunning. And he’ll do that in three pages — very, very briefly. I realized that this arc, in the tendencies of the essay over the last several hundred years, had a lot in common with what I also liked about blogging, when blogging was really a thing, where you felt like you could discover someone’s blog and get these vignettes. Maybe you didn’t know exactly where they were going to go, and they were really free to experiment, and sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn’t. There was a lot of spontaneity, and I found that moment kind of exhilarating. I think if I’ve tried to do anything as a writer of longer essays, it’s to convey those virtues in a longer form.

As a result, your essays often take a kind of winding and unpredictable path. How do you decide which twists and turns to take?

That’s something else that really depends on the story. I mean, the Japan story wasn’t easy to write in a lot of ways, but it was easy to plan because as I was experiencing it, I just knew what the essay was. I didn’t see the end of it until I got to the end of it, but when I got to the end of it in real life, I knew that was the end of the essay, so it was just a matter of coming home and translating that experience into words. In other stories, where the experience is not so conclusive, it can take a lot of feeling and finding my way in. That was the case with “Lost Highway,” where I got back from Area 51 and then couldn’t find my way into the piece, and I moved to Paris for a while. I went to extreme lengths to try and figure out what I was doing, and it really took a lot of additional thinking and feeling and I had to come back and go see the Trinity Site. That piece felt like putting together a jigsaw puzzle blindfolded.

I think I am uncomfortable with the idea of knowing anything. But I am really intrigued by the idea of productive unknowns, or resonant unknowns. If I can get to a place where the unknowns I’m confronting feel irreducible in some way, or feels like I can’t think my way through it or around it, then I feel like I’m in the right place. As I’m writing, I think the in-between process is often the process of trying to outwit the analytical tendency of my own brain to arrive at a conclusion. I want to continue finding my way through the mysteries and ambiguities of everything until I can’t keep going. To me, that’s the story.

Did you have to look hard for the owl references? It’s uncanny.

I added a couple of them, but some of them were always there. And strangely, some of them had been there in cuts and then I just restored the cut. Like, before I knew that owls were one of the key images of the book, I had written the Alaska essay and had ended up cutting from it a section about how people in Nome had seen this image of this snowy owl in their dreams before they reported alien abductions. And then as I was driving to the Trinity Site in New Mexico, I just happened upon this place called the Owl Cafe, which just happened to be where all the guys who were guarding the bomb before the first test and some of the nuclear scientists had lunch. It slowly dawned on me that owls were showing up a lot in some of these stories. So there were a couple places where I had to insert them, but it was never hard to find an owl. I don’t want to sell it as some sort of paranormal or magical event, but it was a little bit uncanny, at least.

They’ll follow you forever now.

And that’s really true. It turns out that when you write a book with owls in a title, people buy owls for you. Like, I’m a little overrun with owls right now. My mom keeps texting me when she finds an owl, and I’m like, “Don’t get it, mom.”

Isaac Levy-Rubinett is an editor and writer in Los Angeles.

Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/from-the-edge-of-the-world-an-interview-with-brian-phillips/

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samanthasroberts · 7 years

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ReflexLOLogy: Inside the Groan-Inducing World of Pun Competitions

From the moment he spoke, I knew I was screwed. On the surface, the guy wasn’t particularly fearsome—pudgy, late thirties, polo shirt, plaid shorts, baseball cap, dad sneakers—but he looked completely at ease. One hand in his pocket, the other holding the microphone loosely, like a torch singer doing crowd work. And when he finally began talking, it was with an assurance that belied the fact that he was basically spewing nonsense.

“I hate all people named John,” he said with surprising bravado. “Yeah, that’s right, that was a John diss!” The crowd roared. John-diss. Jaundice. A glorious, groan-inducing precision strike of a pun.

Welp, I thought. It was fun while it lasted.

If you’re an NBA rookie, you really don’t want to go up against LeBron James. Anyone’s trivia night would be ruined by seeing Ken Jennings on another team. And if you find yourself at the world’s biggest pun competition, the last person you want to face is four-time defending champion Ben Ziek. Yet that’s exactly where I was, on an outdoor stage in downtown Austin, Texas, committing unspeakable atrocities upon the English language in front of a few hundred onlookers who were spending their sunny May Saturday reveling in the carnage.

The rules of the 39th annual O. Henry Pun-Off World Championship’s “Punslingers” competition are simple: Two people take turns punning on a theme in head-to-head rounds. Failure to make a pun in the five seconds allowed gets you eliminated; make a nonpun or reuse a word three times and you’ve reached the banishing point. Round by round and pair by pair, a field of 32 dwindles until the last of the halved-nots finally gets to claim the mantle of best punster in the world and what most people would agree are some pretty dubious bragging rights. It’s exactly like a rap battle, if 8 Mile had been about software engineers and podcasters and improv nerds vying for supremacy. (Also just like 8 Mile: My first-round opponent had frozen when his turn came to pun on waterborne vehicles. Seriously, yacht a word came out. Canoe believe it?)

Eventually, there we stood, two among the final eight: me, a first-timer, squaring off against the Floyd Mayweather of the pun world. Actually, only one of us was standing; I found myself doing the world’s slowest two-step just to keep my legs from trembling. I’d been a little jittery in my first couple of rounds, sure, but those were standard-issue butterflies, perched on a layer of misguided confidence. This was the anxiety of the sacrificial lamb. I was punning above my weight, and I knew it. Once the judges announced that we’d be punning on diseases—hence Ziek’s joke about star-crossed livers—we began.

“Mumps the word!” I said, hoping that my voice wasn’t shaking.

Ziek immediately fired back: “That was a measle-y pun.” Not only was he confident, with a malleable voice that was equal parts game show host and morning-radio DJ, but his jokes were seemingly fully formed. Worse, he was nimble enough to turn your own pun against you.

“Well, I had a croup-on for it,” I responded. Whoa. Where’d that come from?

He switched gears. “I have a Buddha at home, and sometimes”—making a rubbing motion with his hand—“I like to rubella.”

I was barely paying attention. Diseases, diseases—oh! I pointed at people in different parts of the audience. “If you’ve got a yam, and you’ve got a potato, whose tuber’s closest?”

“There was a guy out here earlier painted light red,” Ziek said. “Did you see the pink guy?”

“I didn’t,” I responded. “Cold you see him?”

Again and again we pun-upped each other, a philharmonic of harmful phonics. From AIDS to Zika we ranged, covering SARS, migraines, Ebola, chicken pox, ague, shingles, fasciitis, streptococcus, West Nile, coronavirus, poison oak, avian flu, gangrene, syphilis, and herpes. Almost five minutes later, we’d gone through 32 puns between the two of us, and I was running dry. As far as my brain was concerned, there wasn’t a medical textbook in existence that contained something we hadn’t used. Ziek, though, had a seemingly endless stockpile and tossed off a quick alopecia pun; I could have bald right then and there. The judge counted down, and I slunk offstage to watch the rest of the competition—which Ziek won, for the fifth time. Knowing I’d lost to the best cushioned the blow, but some mild semantic depression still lingered: Instead of slinging my way to a David-like upset, I was the one who had to go lieth down.

Author Peter Rubin doing the punning man.Ryan Young

When I was growing up, my father’s favorite (printable) joke was “Where do cantaloupes go in the summertime? Johnny Cougar’s Melon Camp.” This is proof that—well, it’s proof that I grew up in Indiana. But it’s also proof that I was raised to speak two languages, both of them English. See, there’s the actual words-working-together-and-making-sense part, and then there’s the fun part. The pliant, recombinant part. The part that lets you harness linguistic irregularities, judo-style, to make words into other words. It’s not conscious, exactly; it just feels at some level like someone made a puzzle and didn’t bother to tell me, so my brain wants to figure out what else those sounds can do.

A lifetime of listening to hip hop has reinforced that phonetic impulse. Polysyllabic rhymes aren’t strictly puns, but they’re made of the same marrow; when Chance the Rapper rhymes “link in my bio” with “Cinco de Mayo” in the song “Mixtape,” I get an actual endorphin hit. Besides, rap is full of puns already: instant-gratification ones—like Lil Wayne saying “Yes I am Weezy, but I ain’t asthmatic” or MF Doom saying “Got more soul than a sock with a hole”—as well as ones that reveal themselves more slowly. Kanye West might be more famous for his production than his lyricism, but he endeared himself to me forever on the song “Dark Fantasy” by spitting the best Family Matters pun of all time: “Too many Urkels on your team, that’s why your wins low.”

I was punning above my weight, and I knew it.

Whether this is nature or nurture, though, the end result is the same: I’m playing with language all the time, and Kanye and I aren’t the only ones. “I can’t listen passively to someone speaking without the possibility of puns echoing around in my head,” says Gary Hallock, who has been producing and hosting the O. Henry Pun-Off for 26 years. He’s seen the annual event grow from an Austin oddity to a national event and watched dad jokes, of which puns are the most obvious example, take hold in the millennial consciousness; a dad-joke-devoted Reddit board boasts more than 250,000 members. “I’ve often compared punsters to linguistic terrorists,” Hallock says. “We’re literally stalking conversations, looking for the weak place to plant our bomb.”

And we’ve been doing it for a long, long time—verbal puns date back to at least 1635 BC, when a Babylonian clay tablet included a pun on the word for “wheat”—and the world has been conflicted about them for nearly as long. (Linguists can’t even agree whether the word pun derives from French, Old English, Icelandic, or Welsh, though there’s no point heading down that scenic root.) On one hand, puns are the stuff of terrible children’s joke books. Oliver Wendell Holmes likened punsters to “wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.” On the other, God, how can you not feel a little thrill when you make a good one or a begrudging joy when you hear a better one?

Humor theorists generally agree that comedy hinges on incongruity: when a sentence or situation subverts expectations or when multiple interpretations are suggested by the same stimulus. (Also, yes, humor theorists are a thing.) That stimulus can be visual (looking at you, eggplant emoji!) or auditory (what up, tuba fart!); most commonly, though, it’s linguistic. Language is slippery by nature, and of the many kinds of wordplay—hyperbole, metaphor, spoonerisms, even letter-level foolery like anagrams—nothing takes advantage of incongruity quite like puns, of which there are four specific varieties. In order of increasing complexity, you’ve got homonyms, identical words that sound alike (“Led Zeppelin’s guitarist was interrogated last week, but detectives weren’t able to turn the Page”); homophones, which are spelled differently but sound the same (“I hate raisins! Apologies if you’re not into curranty vents.”); homographs, which sound different but look the same (“If you’re asking me to believe that a Loire cabernet is that different from a Napa cabernet, then the terroirists have won.”); and paronyms, which are just kinda similar-sounding (“I have a ton of work to do, but I ate so much cucumber chutney that I have raita’s block”). When we hear a pun, the words we hear aren’t the words we think we hear, and the burden’s on us to crack the code.

Granted, there are people out there who hate puns, and maybe rightly so. But for many of us, that decryption process is a reward unto itself. “Humor happens when something important is being violated,” cognitive scientist Justine Kao says. “Social norms, expectations. So for people who are sensitive to the rules that language follows, puns are more entertaining.” In other words, if you work with words on a daily basis—writing, editing, translating—you’re simply primed to appreciate them more. Behind every great headline, any editor will tell you, is a great pun. (I have a colleague at WIRED who once looked at a page about chef’s knives and gave it the headline “JULIENNE MORE”; people lost their goddamn minds.)

Still, even among the nerdiest of word herders, there are some rules. Two years ago, Kao and two colleagues at Stanford and UC San Diego decided to prove empirically that incongruity was the root of humor. They tested people’s reactions to hundreds of sentences that varied from one another in minute ways. Some used homophones; some didn’t. Some added detail supporting the nonpun interpretation of the sentence; some stripped detail away. They were able to demonstrate that ambiguity of meaning is necessary for a pun to be perceived—but it’s only half of the equation. (And literally, there’s an equation.) After all, “I went to the bank” is ambiguous, but it’s not a pun. The true determining factor of a pun’s funniness is what the team calls distinctiveness.

Take the sentence “The chef brought his girlfriend flours on Valentine’s Day.” It’s a homophone, so it’s not the most complex pun. But if you turn the chef into a pastry chef, that added vocation property makes the pun more distinctive. “When you’re able to identify keywords from different topics,” Kao says, “it clues you in on the intentionality of it—you’re forcing together two things that don’t often co-occur.”

Of course, “The pastry chef brought his girlfriend flours on Valentine’s Day” still isn’t funny. It’s the kind of pun a bot would make, and maybe has made in the decades since programmers created the first pun generator. There’s no storytelling to it, no drama. A good pun isn’t just an artless slab of sound-alikeness: It’s a joke that happens to hinge on wordplay. A truly formidable punner knows that and frames a sentence to make the pun the punch line. The longer you delay the ambiguity, the more tension you introduce—and the more cathartic the resolution. A pun should be an exclamation point, not a semicolon.

But was I a truly formidable punner? I’d thought so—hell, my lifelong dream is seeing Flavor Flav and Ellen Burstyn cohosting a talk show, just so it can be called Burstyn With Flavor—but after Austin, I had my doubts. I’d cracked under pressure once; until I tried again, I’d never know fissure. As it turned out, a second chance was around the corner.

The Bay Area Pun-Off, a monthly philharmonic of harmful phonics.Ryan Young

Compact and jovial, Jonah Spear is a dead ringer for Saturday Night Live’s Taran Killam—or at least for Taran Killam in high school: Spear recently shaved off a grizzled-prospector beard and looks about half of his 34 years. He’s also a professional play facilitator and counselor at an adult summer camp (no to phones and drinking, yes to sing-alongs and bonfires). That loosey-goosey vibe has carried into the Bay Area Pun-Off, a monthly event Spear began hosting in January that’s just one of a handful of competitive punning events popping up across the country.

If the O. Henry Pun-Off is the Newport Folk Festival, then its Bay Area cousin—like Punderdome 3000 in Brooklyn, Pundamonium in Seattle, or the Great Durham Pun Championship in, well, Durham—is Coachella. The audience is younger, and the raucous atmosphere is fueled as much by beer as by unabashed pun love. It started in the living room of a communal house in Oakland in January 2016 but quickly outgrew its confines; in June the organizers even staged a New York City satellite event.

But on this Saturday night, a week after O. Henry, it’s a high-ceilinged performance space in San Francisco’s Mission District where I’m looking for redemption. The pool of contestants at the Bay Area Pun-Off is small by O. Henry standards, and we commence with an all-hands marathon on tree puns designed to winnow the field of 12 down to eight. “I’m just hoping to win the poplar vote,” one woman says. “Sounds like birch of contract to me,” says someone else. A lanky British guy whom I’ll call Chet rambles through a shaggy-dog story involving a French woman and three Jamaican guys to get to a tortured “le mon t’ree” punch line. The crowd eats it up.

“Keep the applause going. It takes balsa get up here and do this.”

When you’re waiting for 11 other people to pun, you’ve got plenty of time to think of your next one, so I try to Ziek out a good-sized reserve of puns—and when it’s my turn, I make sure that my puns build on the joke that came before me. “Keep the applause going,” I say after someone boughs out. “It takes balsa get up here and do this.” After someone delivers a good line, I admit that “I ended up being pretty frond of it.” They’re not distinctive, but at this stage they don’t need to be, as long as they’re ambiguous. Things go oak-ay, and I’m on to the next round. (What, yew don’t believe me? Olive got is my word.)

After I indulge in a muggleful of Harry Potter puns, I find myself in the semifinals against a Quora engineer named Asa. Spear scribbles the mystery topic on a small chalkboard hidden from sight, then turns it around. It says … diseases. The same category that knocked me out in Austin? The category I dwelled on for the entire flight home, thinking of all the one-liners that had eluded me?

This time, there’s no running dry. Not only do I remember all the puns I used against Ben Ziek, but I remember all the puns he made against me. So when Asa says, “I’m really taking my mumps,” I shoot back with “That’s kinda measly, if you ask me.” I reprise puns I’d made in Austin (“Did you see that Italian opera singer run through the door? In flew Enzo!”); I use puns that I’d thought of since (“My mom makes the best onion dip. It’s HIV little concoction you’d love”). Asa fights gamely, but I have immunerable disease puns at my fingertips, and it’s not much longer before the round is over.

And then, again, there are two: me and Chet. The difference now is I’m locked in: no nerves, no self-consciousness, just getting out of my brain’s way and letting the connections happen. When Spear announces the theme—living world leaders—I don’t even start trying to stockpile puns. I just wait, and they come.

Chet opens the round: “Ohhhh, BAMA. I don’t know anything about world leaders!”

This time, just hearing him mention Obama conjures up a mental image of Justin Trudeau. Before the laughter even dies down, I nod my head encouragingly: “True, tho—that was a decent pun!”

It’s Austin all over again, just in reverse: Now I’m the quick one and Chet’s the one who has to scramble. He fumbles through a long story about rock climbing that leads to a pun about his cam-bell. (And before you ask: Chances are he wasn’t actually talking about Kim Campbell, who was prime minister of Canada for all of six months in 1993, but in the heat of the moment no one realized he’d just screwed up David Cameron’s name.)

My turn? No problem. Just keep flipping it back to him. “Another patented long-ass Chet story,” I say. “I am Bushed.”

“Well,” Chet says, then pauses. “He thinks he can just … Blair shit out.”

It’s his one solid blow. I talk about the “bonky moon” that’s shining outside that night. I confide in the audience about my own alopecia problem, and how I needed to buy a Merkel. And each time, the audience is right there with me. They don’t necessarily know what’s coming, but they’re loving it. Chet’s used three US presidents and two prime ministers; meanwhile, I’ve been from South Korea to Germany, by way of Canada.

Even better, I’ve got another continent in my pocket. “Have you guys been to Chet’s farm?” I ask the audience. “He has this group of cows that won’t stop talking.” I wait a beat. “They are seriously moo-gabby.”

What happens next is a blur, to be perfectly honest. I can’t even tell you what comes out of Chet’s mouth next, but it’s either nothing or it’s the name of someone dead—and either way, the Bay Area Pun-Off is over.

I might not have been able to vanquish Ben Ziek; this may be my only taste of victory in the world of competitive paronomasiacs; hell, I may never know the secret to the perfect pun. But as long as I’ve got the words to try, one thing’s for sure: I’ll use vaguely different words to approximate those words, thereby creating incongruity and thus humor.

Or maybe I’ll just plead raita’s block.

Phrase the Roof!

Author Peter Rubin set up a Slack channel here at Wired to crowdsource the punny headlines for the opening illustration to this story. He compiled more than 150 of them. Here are the ones we couldnt fit.

1. PRESENTS OF MIND

2. SHEER PUNDEMONIUM

3. VIRULENT HOMOPHONIA

4. OFF-SYLLABLE USE

5. PUNBELIEVABLE

6. HEADLINE BLING

7. LIVE A CRITIC, DIACRITIC

8. FEAST OF THE PRONUNCIATION

9. VERBAL MEDICATION

10. THE BEST OF BOTH WORDS

11. SUFFERING FROM INCONSONANT

12. DAMNED WITH FAINT PHRASE

13. THE SEVEN DEADLY SYNTAXES

14. THE NOUN JEWELS

15. PUNS THE WORD

16. CONSONANT READER

17. FARTS OF SPEECH

18. PUN-CHEWATION

19. GRAMMAR RULES

20. POISSON PEN

21. PUNS AND NEEDLES

22. DEATH AND SYNTAXES

23. THE WRITE STUFF

24. MAKING THE COPY

25. SLAIN LETTERING

26. PUN AND GAMES

27. VALLEY OF THE LOLZ

28. NOUN HEAR THIS

29. WHATEVER FLOATS YOUR QUOTE

30. PUT A VERB ON IT!

31. CRIME AND PUN-NICHE-MEANT

32. TIC TALK

33. ECCE HOMONYM

34. DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXTS ASS

35. WRITES OF MAN

36. VERB APPEAL

37. THE RHYME DIRECTIVE

38. SLOGAN’S RUN

39. REBEL WITHOUT A CLAUSE

40. BURNS OF PHRASE

41. ARTLESS QUOTATIONS

42. BON MOT MONEY, BON MOT PROBLEMS

43. JESTIN’ CASE

44. LET ‘ER QUIP

45. ADVERB REACTIONS

46. INFINITE JESTS

47. ARTS OF SPEECH

48. DIGITAL PUNDERGROUND

49. THE PUN-ISHER

50. IMPUNDING DOOM

51. BEYOND PUNDERDOME

52. BAUHAUS OF CARDS

53. TEXTUAL HARASSMENT

54. IT’S A PUNGLE OUT THERE

55. GRAND THEFT MOTTO

56. IT HAD PUNNED ONE NIGHT

57. PLEASE GRAMMAR DON’T HURT EM

58. RHETORICAL QUESTIN’

59. ACUTE PUNS? SURE

60. BAWDILY HUMORED

61. DAMNED IF YOU INNUENDO, DAMNED IF YOU INNUENDON’T

62. TROUBLE ENTENDRES

63. WITS UP, DOC

64. SELF-IMPROV MEANT

65. PUN-EYED JOKERS

66. LAUGHTERMATH

67. JAPES OF WRATH

68. MAKING HA-HAJJ

69. MUTTER, MAY I?

70. BATTLE OF HALF-WITS

71. DEMI-BRAVADO

72. MALCONTENT MARKETING

73. NON-SILENT OFFENSES

74. ORAL HIJINX

75. THE PUN-ISHER

76. NOUNS, YOUR CHANCE

77. TEXT OF KIN

78. OH, PUN AND SHUT

79. JOKE OF ALL TRADES

80. PATTER UP

81. SCHTICK IT TO EM

82. BOOS HOUNDS

83. IT’S NOT EASY BEING GROANED

84. FAR FROM THE MADDENED CROWD

85. COMPETITIVE DEBASING

86. THE PUNFORGIVEN

87. THE PUNCANNY VALLEY

88. INTENTIONAL FORTITUDE

89. CHURCH OF THE LETTER DISDAIN

90. POETRY IN MASHIN’

91. CREATIVE SENTENCING

92. DAAAMN, DACTYL!

93. NO CONTEXT

94. A TALE OF TWO SILLIES

95. THE WIZARD OF LOLZ

96. IT’S A PUNDERFUL LIFE

97. WHAT’S HA? PUNNIN’

98. THE ZING AND I

99. THE WILD PUNS

100. THE PUN ALSO RISES

101. HOW THE REST WERE PUNNED

102. RAGING SYLLABLE

103. DANGEROUS ELISIONS

104. GOODWILL PUNTING

105. FELLOWSHIP OF THE WRONG

106. INGLOURIOUS LAST WORDS

107. THE LIMITATION GAME

108. APPETITE FOR DISTRACTION

109. HOW I MEANT ANOTHER

110. LARKS AND RECREATION

111. COMEDY OF AIRERS

112. DECLARATION OF INNER PENANCE

113. BOO HA-HA

Senior editor and pun criminal Peter Rubin (@provenself) wrote about the roadblocks to VR in issue 24.04.

This article appears in the October 2016 issue.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/09/12/reflexlology-inside-the-groan-inducing-world-of-pun-competitions/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/reflexlology-inside-the-groan-inducing-world-of-pun-competitions/

0 notes

adambstingus · 7 years

Text

ReflexLOLogy: Inside the Groan-Inducing World of Pun Competitions

Welp, I thought. It was fun while it lasted.

“Mumps the word!” I said, hoping that my voice wasn’t shaking.

“Well, I had a croup-on for it,” I responded. Whoa. Where’d that come from?

He switched gears. “I have a Buddha at home, and sometimes”—making a rubbing motion with his hand—“I like to rubella.”

I was barely paying attention. Diseases, diseases—oh! I pointed at people in different parts of the audience. “If you’ve got a yam, and you’ve got a potato, whose tuber’s closest?”

“There was a guy out here earlier painted light red,” Ziek said. “Did you see the pink guy?”

“I didn’t,” I responded. “Cold you see him?”

Author Peter Rubin doing the punning man.Ryan Young

I was punning above my weight, and I knew it.

The Bay Area Pun-Off, a monthly philharmonic of harmful phonics.Ryan Young

“Keep the applause going. It takes balsa get up here and do this.”

Chet opens the round: “Ohhhh, BAMA. I don’t know anything about world leaders!”

This time, just hearing him mention Obama conjures up a mental image of Justin Trudeau. Before the laughter even dies down, I nod my head encouragingly: “True, tho—that was a decent pun!”

My turn? No problem. Just keep flipping it back to him. “Another patented long-ass Chet story,” I say. “I am Bushed.”

“Well,” Chet says, then pauses. “He thinks he can just … Blair shit out.”

Or maybe I’ll just plead raita’s block.

Phrase the Roof!

1. PRESENTS OF MIND

2. SHEER PUNDEMONIUM

3. VIRULENT HOMOPHONIA

4. OFF-SYLLABLE USE

5. PUNBELIEVABLE

6. HEADLINE BLING

7. LIVE A CRITIC, DIACRITIC

8. FEAST OF THE PRONUNCIATION

9. VERBAL MEDICATION

10. THE BEST OF BOTH WORDS

11. SUFFERING FROM INCONSONANT

12. DAMNED WITH FAINT PHRASE

13. THE SEVEN DEADLY SYNTAXES

14. THE NOUN JEWELS

15. PUNS THE WORD

16. CONSONANT READER

17. FARTS OF SPEECH

18. PUN-CHEWATION

19. GRAMMAR RULES

20. POISSON PEN

21. PUNS AND NEEDLES

22. DEATH AND SYNTAXES

23. THE WRITE STUFF

24. MAKING THE COPY

25. SLAIN LETTERING

26. PUN AND GAMES

27. VALLEY OF THE LOLZ

28. NOUN HEAR THIS

29. WHATEVER FLOATS YOUR QUOTE

30. PUT A VERB ON IT!

31. CRIME AND PUN-NICHE-MEANT

32. TIC TALK

33. ECCE HOMONYM

34. DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXTS ASS

35. WRITES OF MAN

36. VERB APPEAL

37. THE RHYME DIRECTIVE

38. SLOGAN’S RUN

39. REBEL WITHOUT A CLAUSE

40. BURNS OF PHRASE

41. ARTLESS QUOTATIONS

42. BON MOT MONEY, BON MOT PROBLEMS

43. JESTIN’ CASE

44. LET ‘ER QUIP

45. ADVERB REACTIONS

46. INFINITE JESTS

47. ARTS OF SPEECH

48. DIGITAL PUNDERGROUND

49. THE PUN-ISHER

50. IMPUNDING DOOM

51. BEYOND PUNDERDOME

52. BAUHAUS OF CARDS

53. TEXTUAL HARASSMENT

54. IT’S A PUNGLE OUT THERE

55. GRAND THEFT MOTTO

56. IT HAD PUNNED ONE NIGHT

57. PLEASE GRAMMAR DON’T HURT EM

58. RHETORICAL QUESTIN’

59. ACUTE PUNS? SURE

60. BAWDILY HUMORED

61. DAMNED IF YOU INNUENDO, DAMNED IF YOU INNUENDON’T

62. TROUBLE ENTENDRES

63. WITS UP, DOC

64. SELF-IMPROV MEANT

65. PUN-EYED JOKERS

66. LAUGHTERMATH

67. JAPES OF WRATH

68. MAKING HA-HAJJ

69. MUTTER, MAY I?

70. BATTLE OF HALF-WITS

71. DEMI-BRAVADO

72. MALCONTENT MARKETING

73. NON-SILENT OFFENSES

74. ORAL HIJINX

75. THE PUN-ISHER

76. NOUNS, YOUR CHANCE

77. TEXT OF KIN

78. OH, PUN AND SHUT

79. JOKE OF ALL TRADES

80. PATTER UP

81. SCHTICK IT TO EM

82. BOOS HOUNDS

83. IT’S NOT EASY BEING GROANED

84. FAR FROM THE MADDENED CROWD

85. COMPETITIVE DEBASING

86. THE PUNFORGIVEN

87. THE PUNCANNY VALLEY

88. INTENTIONAL FORTITUDE

89. CHURCH OF THE LETTER DISDAIN

90. POETRY IN MASHIN’

91. CREATIVE SENTENCING

92. DAAAMN, DACTYL!

93. NO CONTEXT

94. A TALE OF TWO SILLIES

95. THE WIZARD OF LOLZ

96. IT’S A PUNDERFUL LIFE

97. WHAT’S HA? PUNNIN’

98. THE ZING AND I

99. THE WILD PUNS

100. THE PUN ALSO RISES

101. HOW THE REST WERE PUNNED

102. RAGING SYLLABLE

103. DANGEROUS ELISIONS

104. GOODWILL PUNTING

105. FELLOWSHIP OF THE WRONG

106. INGLOURIOUS LAST WORDS

107. THE LIMITATION GAME

108. APPETITE FOR DISTRACTION

109. HOW I MEANT ANOTHER

110. LARKS AND RECREATION

111. COMEDY OF AIRERS

112. DECLARATION OF INNER PENANCE

113. BOO HA-HA

Senior editor and pun criminal Peter Rubin (@provenself) wrote about the roadblocks to VR in issue 24.04.

This article appears in the October 2016 issue.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/09/12/reflexlology-inside-the-groan-inducing-world-of-pun-competitions/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/165253970052

0 notes

allofbeercom · 7 years

Text

ReflexLOLogy: Inside the Groan-Inducing World of Pun Competitions

Welp, I thought. It was fun while it lasted.

“Mumps the word!” I said, hoping that my voice wasn’t shaking.

“Well, I had a croup-on for it,” I responded. Whoa. Where’d that come from?

He switched gears. “I have a Buddha at home, and sometimes”—making a rubbing motion with his hand—“I like to rubella.”

I was barely paying attention. Diseases, diseases—oh! I pointed at people in different parts of the audience. “If you’ve got a yam, and you’ve got a potato, whose tuber’s closest?”

“There was a guy out here earlier painted light red,” Ziek said. “Did you see the pink guy?”

“I didn’t,” I responded. “Cold you see him?”

Author Peter Rubin doing the punning man.Ryan Young

I was punning above my weight, and I knew it.

The Bay Area Pun-Off, a monthly philharmonic of harmful phonics.Ryan Young

“Keep the applause going. It takes balsa get up here and do this.”

Chet opens the round: “Ohhhh, BAMA. I don’t know anything about world leaders!”

This time, just hearing him mention Obama conjures up a mental image of Justin Trudeau. Before the laughter even dies down, I nod my head encouragingly: “True, tho—that was a decent pun!”

My turn? No problem. Just keep flipping it back to him. “Another patented long-ass Chet story,” I say. “I am Bushed.”

“Well,” Chet says, then pauses. “He thinks he can just … Blair shit out.”

Or maybe I’ll just plead raita’s block.

Phrase the Roof!

1. PRESENTS OF MIND

2. SHEER PUNDEMONIUM

3. VIRULENT HOMOPHONIA

4. OFF-SYLLABLE USE

5. PUNBELIEVABLE

6. HEADLINE BLING

7. LIVE A CRITIC, DIACRITIC

8. FEAST OF THE PRONUNCIATION

9. VERBAL MEDICATION

10. THE BEST OF BOTH WORDS

11. SUFFERING FROM INCONSONANT

12. DAMNED WITH FAINT PHRASE

13. THE SEVEN DEADLY SYNTAXES

14. THE NOUN JEWELS

15. PUNS THE WORD

16. CONSONANT READER

17. FARTS OF SPEECH

18. PUN-CHEWATION

19. GRAMMAR RULES

20. POISSON PEN

21. PUNS AND NEEDLES

22. DEATH AND SYNTAXES

23. THE WRITE STUFF

24. MAKING THE COPY

25. SLAIN LETTERING

26. PUN AND GAMES

27. VALLEY OF THE LOLZ

28. NOUN HEAR THIS

29. WHATEVER FLOATS YOUR QUOTE

30. PUT A VERB ON IT!

31. CRIME AND PUN-NICHE-MEANT

32. TIC TALK

33. ECCE HOMONYM

34. DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXTS ASS

35. WRITES OF MAN

36. VERB APPEAL

37. THE RHYME DIRECTIVE

38. SLOGAN’S RUN

39. REBEL WITHOUT A CLAUSE

40. BURNS OF PHRASE

41. ARTLESS QUOTATIONS

42. BON MOT MONEY, BON MOT PROBLEMS

43. JESTIN’ CASE

44. LET ‘ER QUIP

45. ADVERB REACTIONS

46. INFINITE JESTS

47. ARTS OF SPEECH

48. DIGITAL PUNDERGROUND

49. THE PUN-ISHER

50. IMPUNDING DOOM

51. BEYOND PUNDERDOME

52. BAUHAUS OF CARDS

53. TEXTUAL HARASSMENT

54. IT’S A PUNGLE OUT THERE

55. GRAND THEFT MOTTO

56. IT HAD PUNNED ONE NIGHT

57. PLEASE GRAMMAR DON’T HURT EM

58. RHETORICAL QUESTIN’

59. ACUTE PUNS? SURE

60. BAWDILY HUMORED

61. DAMNED IF YOU INNUENDO, DAMNED IF YOU INNUENDON’T

62. TROUBLE ENTENDRES

63. WITS UP, DOC

64. SELF-IMPROV MEANT

65. PUN-EYED JOKERS

66. LAUGHTERMATH

67. JAPES OF WRATH

68. MAKING HA-HAJJ

69. MUTTER, MAY I?

70. BATTLE OF HALF-WITS

71. DEMI-BRAVADO

72. MALCONTENT MARKETING

73. NON-SILENT OFFENSES

74. ORAL HIJINX

75. THE PUN-ISHER

76. NOUNS, YOUR CHANCE

77. TEXT OF KIN

78. OH, PUN AND SHUT

79. JOKE OF ALL TRADES

80. PATTER UP

81. SCHTICK IT TO EM

82. BOOS HOUNDS

83. IT’S NOT EASY BEING GROANED

84. FAR FROM THE MADDENED CROWD

85. COMPETITIVE DEBASING

86. THE PUNFORGIVEN

87. THE PUNCANNY VALLEY

88. INTENTIONAL FORTITUDE

89. CHURCH OF THE LETTER DISDAIN

90. POETRY IN MASHIN’

91. CREATIVE SENTENCING

92. DAAAMN, DACTYL!

93. NO CONTEXT

94. A TALE OF TWO SILLIES

95. THE WIZARD OF LOLZ

96. IT’S A PUNDERFUL LIFE

97. WHAT’S HA? PUNNIN’

98. THE ZING AND I

99. THE WILD PUNS

100. THE PUN ALSO RISES

101. HOW THE REST WERE PUNNED

102. RAGING SYLLABLE

103. DANGEROUS ELISIONS

104. GOODWILL PUNTING

105. FELLOWSHIP OF THE WRONG

106. INGLOURIOUS LAST WORDS

107. THE LIMITATION GAME

108. APPETITE FOR DISTRACTION

109. HOW I MEANT ANOTHER

110. LARKS AND RECREATION

111. COMEDY OF AIRERS

112. DECLARATION OF INNER PENANCE

113. BOO HA-HA

Senior editor and pun criminal Peter Rubin (@provenself) wrote about the roadblocks to VR in issue 24.04.

This article appears in the October 2016 issue.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/09/12/reflexlology-inside-the-groan-inducing-world-of-pun-competitions/

0 notes