Fandom Appreciation Challenge, Day 4: In praise of an unsung heroine
So, in the last post I talked about the TS Newsletter. One of the items that appears every week is the results of the writing challenge site Sentinel Thursday . The idea is to kick the muses in the butt by providing a different word prompt every Thursday. Sometimes this results in the smallest stand-alone drabble. Other times, it's the ficlet that later blossoms out into a full-blown novel at the author's site. Still other times, each week's challenge word becomes a segment in a much larger work. The site has been on LJ since 2003. I'm not sure whether it grew out of another website. Here's the link:
http://community.livejournal.com/sentinel_thurs/
mab_browne has been modding a little over two years now. What with real life intruding on everyone, we often don't see as many stories at Sen Thurs as in years past; some weeks there aren't any takers at all. Still, Mab faithfully sums up what stories/artwork has been completed for one prompt and puts up the next one every Thursday like clockwork. It's remarkable that she remembers to do it on Thursdays here in the States, since she's a Kiwi. A nice touch that. I'm not sure where she gets her prompts from. Perhaps she asks people, or perhaps she opens up a dictionary and throw darts at it. All I know is that it continues to generate stories and provides gentle prods to kick-start authors who might otherwise be lost in the doldrums. And it attracts new authors and old ones alike.
So thanks Mab for being the support system for this long-running and beloved challenge site. You rock!