New Nonsense Writing Contest - Prizes Worth Over 30 STEEM - Ends Sun 12 Jan

What better way to start the year than with a florilegium of nonsense!

You think cryptos are serious business? Well, take a look at some of last year's gaffes and blunders.

In the spirit of serious mischief, I would like to start a series of Nonsense Writing Contests.

The Contests themselves are real, with real prizes but everything else is a hornet's nest of the imagination.

You may submit either poetry or prose, so long as you don't give your readers a stack overflow.

Serious Time

As this is the first Nonsense Writing Contest, I'm going to let it run for 10 days. Just to let the festive cheer wear off and the creative juices flow again in compensation.

Today is Thursday 2 January, so this Nonsense Writing Contest will end on Sunday 12 January.

Future contests could be weekly if there is any strong demand.

I shall post a few times during this period to wake everyone up and to highlight those entries that I found most amusing.

You may submit your entry either as a comment or as a post with the link added to a comment - or both if you wish to cover both bases.

Each person may submit up to two entries per contest.

Any more would strike me as, frankly, a plea for therapy.

If your entry is in grave danger of making sense, then may I suggest investing in a pair of sharp scissors and splicing it up into a concordance; previously unfathomable messages may be found gasping for air. You could use your favourite wordprocessor, but where's the physical fun in that?

Anyway, I'm sure you have your own recipe for insanity.

What have I forgotten?

The Prizes!

Setting prizes imposes such a limitation that it's almost more angst than it's worth. Subtract the time it takes to think of a number and the prize value dwindles to a mere token.

So, my random number generator came up with the number... 6.

Lemme try again.

28!

For any mathematicians, that means "28, exclamation!" and not "28 factorial" - which would be hallucinatory.

These things take time.

Have you ever tried writing a 12-tone jingle?

So, the total prize amount will be 28 MAPR tokens - currently worth some 30 STEEM.

The MAPR fund will soon be celebrating 2 years in existence, so that's my excuse for this largesse.

In my head, as a first iteration, this looks like ten prizes of 2 MAPR tokens plus a couple of winners receiving 4 MAPR tokens extra.

I am at liberty to scramble these numbers or increase them if I so wish.

If nobody submits even a jot, I shall be at liberty to keep the lot.

The Theme

There is no theme.

As the first Nonsense Writing Contest, I am leaving the topic completely open ended.

One potential pitfall strategy is to diffract an existing nonsense poem through our 2020 vision.

Here is an example I just wrote to illustrate the folly wisdom of this method.

There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked style,
He found a crooked coin deep inside a crooked smile;
He bought a crooked fox, who untied a crooked knot,
And they both lived together in a great big crooked yacht.

The boundary between nursery rhymes and nonsense poetry is rather blurred; most children end up sensible and well-rounded adults, so no harm done.

If you do require a prompt - or a whip - then I have just discovered this remote prompter, courtesy of @shadowspub. (Here is the same article but parachuting straight into the Shady Writing community group hive mind meld experience!)

The No-Nonsense Version

Just kidding!

OK, here's a humourless precis.

This Nonsense Writing Contest will run for 10 days.
Starting date is Thursday 2 January, hence the end date is Sunday 12 January.
The nonsense writing may be verse or prose.
A user may submit up to two pieces.
Submissions may be inserted directly into a comment below or published as a post with a comment link.
Prizes shall total at least 28 MAPR tokens, to be distributed during the second week.
I shall post updates and include any notable entries received thus far.

Your work and my opinion are both subjective, so we can both agree on one thing.

Let the Gibber Games begin!

As further inducements to at least spread the word, I shall be giving out a plethora of votes and other tokens to those kind souls who resteem this far and wide. (Subject to the availability of a suitably recent post in which to deliver such gifts.)

I could ramble on, but...

The End.

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_{images:
[1] Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash, Quote from Notable Quotes, ascribed to Dr Seuss but within a book I was unable to obtain and hence verify.
[2] by June Hanabi from Pixabay
[3] Image from wikimedia}

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