I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas, and now it's time to address some old business.

Everyone knows I have crazy ideas. Around the holidays, I get a little crazier. It's always been that way. I don't even question it. Any more. Why bother? It will only make me crazier.

Image from Pixabay.

So this year, I decided to wish all my #Steemit friends a Merry Christmas with a crazy little contest I called Concoct-a-Verb contest. Just as the name sounds, the idea is to concoct a verb. That is, make one up. Definition and all. Then, they were to tell a story to illustrate their verb without using the concocted verb in question in the story. I had several people enter (because, evidently, they're just as crazy as I am).

Entrants included:

• Quillfire, aka Eternal Babbler
• Shadowmask, a penumbra of a wisp
• Manoldonchev, first to perform (every whore's dream)
• ifoundnoel, which I didn't know was lost
• stever82, who is a sucker for punishment
• And no one else, who I'm sure needs no introduction

I promised the winner of this contest some STEEM, but I didn't say how much. And the criteria was somewhat vague, as well. It would be based on "how weird" I felt after reading each entry. To be honest--brutal confession time--I felt weird coming up with this contest in the first place, so I'm not sure how to measure the weirdness after reading the entries. Sorry I can't give you all something a bit more concrete, but you can't turn a mudpit into a rock quarry. How's that for expectations?

Without further ado, I give you the following review of each of the entries. Then I'll announce the winner (if there is one).

Review of Concoctors, Not Entirely of Verbs

A weird contest deserves a weird review, so I'll take these from the bottom up.

@Stever82 - Drunkcellence. To achieve a level of excellence available only when you're drunk.

If you've never been drunkcellent, you've never been drunk enough. The feeling I've had after my fair share of drunken bouts of exuberation can't compare to the marvelously fantastic feeling you get the moment you do something in that inebriated state you could never pull off while sober. Thanks Stever82 for assigning a verb to this.

@ifoundnoel - Floustipp. Paying for something with fresh cut flowers.

I did this once. I'd heard you were supposed to take flowers to your date when you pick her up. Little did I know, this one was expecting cash. Gasp!

In a perfect illustration of this weird verb, the protagonist ordered a pizza and paid for it with a rose. At least he didn't go mum.

And kudos for not finding the lost letter of the alphabet.

@manoldonchev - Imandle. Handling the consequences of your imagination.

I have to give credit where a debit is due. Manol is a brilliant conjurer, though but a half-assed concocter. I found his story of Homer as an AI much more interesting than his word, though his word has clout on its own. I'll not deny that. Still, the story made me feel weird. I couldn't help but wonder afterward if I might be an AI.

@shadowmask - Snewdling. The process of bouncing through deep snow.

When I think of this, I think of skipping rocks on white fluffy stuff. Not Shadow, he thought of a dog. Okay, a dog snewdling like a rock skipping on water, that's fairly weird. You've got to read the story. Just don't try to pet Roscoe. He might snewdle your doodle. Or is that strudel your noodle?

@quillfire - Followcumventing. To circumvent your own following by making up stupid rules to social media contests.

Quillfire is one of these people who has to take everything to the extreme. If you say, "Don't touch this button because it will blow up the world," not only will he touch the button, but he'll punch it, kick it, and smash it with a sledgehammer. That's just the kind of guy he is. So what does he do? He writes the most lurid piece of metafiction in history where I--the iconic Blockurator--am both protagonist and antagonist. And for what? Just to prove what kind of nutjob I am for expecting him to follow my stupid rules. He did. But I'm still a followcumventing asscracker.

Image from Pixabay.

So Who Won?

For sheer phonetics and acoustics, I like the look and feel of snewdling. It looks like a real word. And then I Googled it. Trust me, you don't want to do that! This word has a very close cousin (too close if you ask me).

While, snewdling looks and sounds like a really cool word (I could write a poem with that word!), that wasn't the point of the contest. In terms of weirdness, Manol and Quill are running neck and neck on the home stretch. Quill made me feel weird because I'm the theme of his freaking story. It's plotless. It's surreal. It's meta. It's me! And that felt weird. Manol threw Homer in my face as a dagblasted robot, and now I question my own existence. If I wasn't crazy before, I'm loony now.

The best definition is for Floustipp, though Drunkcellence is pretty good too. I like Floustipp because I could actually see some nutty crypto enthusiasts trying to pull this off and claiming their daisies are actually ERC-20 tokens. However, I love the concept of handling the consequences of my imagination, which Quillfire actually forced me to do by shoving my own contest up my plumechute. I think these bozos are in cahoots! It's a conspiracy, I tell you, a conspiracy.

But you know the old adage: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

Yeah, they're out to get me. All of them. And they've succeeded. I declare them all winners just for entering this ridiculous contest. That's why I'm going to sponsor all of them with 1 Steem Basic Income share as a consolation prize. And I'll pass 1 STEEM on to @Quillfire for his drunkcellent and epic mirror of my own soul.

Congratulations! You've driven to me to drinking.

Get your weird lit on:

The Biblical Legends Anthology Series

Garden of Eden	Sulfurings	Deluge
At Amazon	At Amazon	At Amazon

Limerents in the Bog

At Amazon

While you're here, check out the backside 5:

• Picking Up an Exquisite Corpse, and Getting Back to the Garden
• 7 Types of Authority Content for 2019
• Don't Upgrade to WordPress 5.0 Yet
• Enter the Concoct-a-Verb Contest
• Sermon: Why God's Love Ended Up in a Feeding Trough for Animals

Review Me, Please

Created by @EdibleCthulhu
#speculativefiction