Writing Contests

Janet Reid's blog has what I think is the perfect writing contest. It's a 100 words or less writing contest, and she requires the use of five preselected words. I never entered one until yesterday. The five words she required in yesterday's contest compelled me to enter. They were absolutely perfect words: Headgear, Nemesis, Sinister, Minion, and Heinous. I mean, how could you not enter a contest with those words?

And with only 100 words or less, it's not something that would take you all day. It was only a matter of minutes of my time. So I wrote a paragraph and revised it a bit, and here's what I submitted:

The man in blue crunched the headgear and strapped it tight. He ignored the wails. I was but a minion watching from afar, and the cries were unbearable. Mothers cradled infants, and soldiers, pummeled into soulless husks, dropped to their knees like wheat scythed in spring. Our nemesis, an overreaching bloc of sinister origins, snared an unlikely victory, and the only one who stood for a cause awaited his end. But we should have expected it. Once the bridge to our homeworld collapsed, nothing short of nuclear war would have stemmed the heinous tides of crawling encroachment and dark transformation.

The man in blue is a government official, like an executioner. I considered that executioners usually wear black, but this is not a typical earthlike setting, as "...the bridge to our homeworld..." suggested. Besides, I thought "man in blue" sounded better than "man in black" or just, "the executioner." When I write I want the words to sing, and it seemed to sing better that way. I'm hoping that the scenario was explained sufficiently when I wrote, "...and the only one who stood for a cause awaited his end..."

So, what we have in this paragraph is an impending execution by a force of otherworlders who have recently taken over another society. No, it's not a WIP, or an excerpt of anything I have on the table. It's just something that came to me as inspired by the five words. It was fun.