I don't think anybody has done this anywhere else yet.... I had remembered the situation as this: that Mark Twain's children pestered him for stories, and that they would pull 3 or 4 objects out of an old trunk and he'd immediately string them together into a tale. However, when I went searching for verification, what I could find in his autobiography is different: "Along one side of the library, in the Hartford home, the bookshelves joined the mantelpiece--in fact, there were shelves on both sides of the mantelpiece. On these shelves, and on the mantelpiece, stood various ornaments. At one end of the procession was a framed oil-painting of a cat's head; at the other end was a head of a beautiful young girl, life size, called Emmeline, an impressionist water-color. Between the one picture and the other there were twelve or fifteen of the bric-brac things already mentioned, also an oil-painting by Elihu Vedder, "The Young Medusa." Every now and then the children required me to construct a romance--always impromptu--not a moment's preparation permitted--and into that romance I had to get all that bric-brac and the three pictures. I had to start always with the cat and finish with Ernmeline. I was never allowed the refreshment of a change, end for end. It was not permissible to introduce a bric-brac ornament into the story out of its place in the procession. These bric-bracs were never allowed a peaceful day, a reposeful day, a restful Sabbath. In their lives there was no Sabbath. In their lives there was no peace. They knew no existence but a monotonous career of violence and bloodshed. In the course of time the bric-brac and the pictures showed wear. It was because they had had so many and such violent adventures in their romantic careers." Mark Twain, autobiography, vol 2. Not being as draconian as those children, I propose something a bit simpler. :wide evil grin: I propose that we use an alphabetical list of mostly objects, with a nice sprinkling of flexible words which can be read as nouns or verbs or whatever. The alphabetical list would loop around from z to a again. We'd use 3 consecutive words as a basis for our image or written work. The winner gets to determine the next month's list, and can use an existing one (maybe making a few changes to it) or an entirely new compilation. The list can be stuffed with wildly miscellaneous items, or united themes (such as all birds or all music-related). Example: aardvark, bench, canoe, delta, eggplant, fan, glass, horn, imp, jasper, keel, leaves, maze, nest, oracle, page, quick, refuge, secret, talisman, unbridled, velvet, wandering, x-ray, yellow, zipper, ... where a person might write a poem about an eggplant-colored canoe floating in a delta and another might model an imp wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a third person might write a story about an imp named Jasper who keels over, and someone else render a picture of an aardvark zippered into a yellow parka... but they'd all be working off the same list for that month. So, does this sound like fun? Does it sound interesting? Do you think it should be 3 words or 4 or even 5 in the soup? (How tough a challenge do you want it to be... and still come up with something approaching art?). It should be monthly, but staggered, perhaps on the 10th of the months? Feedback, please! Carolly Evil OverMistress of the UnderDark and Catalyst-at-Large