Week 15 Wrap-Up

Sorry this is so late.

Last week’s prompt was from an old ballad about love and treachery. I think I chose it because I wanted to highlight one of the coolest things about The Chrysalis Experiment--the incredible variation we get every week.

The Water is Wide has been covered by everyone from Bob Dylan to Haley Westenra to The Indigo Girls. And each time it's covered, it becomes a completely different song.

Having done NaNoWriMo for the last four years, it seems to me there is a tendency in the forums to bash certain genres or certain subgenres. Specifically, the word cliche seems to come up a lot. As in:

• Vampires/werewolves/fairies/angels/demons/monster-of-the-week, again? Oh that's so cliche.
• Is it just me, or are happy endings getting a little cliche?
• Ack! First person point of view from a female main character is so cliche!

So, I think that it is really funny that a song can be covered a million times and no one thinks that it is cliche, yet when writers follow a certain convention or write in a certain tradition . . . But that might be because some of the best covers are nothing like the original. Case in point:

(Don't listen to these before bed . . . this means you, Winter!)

With that said, I don't think that we had one story last week that was derivative of the original folk song (or even anything that had to do with the imagery in the video.)

• Trisha's Friday Feature was a post-apocalyptic suicide mission with a twisted ending.
• Michael's story--about an abandoned sock--was our Sunday Feature.
• Brooke's story was our Saturday Feature.
• Michelle Wallace gave us a story about a lost eaglet.
• Jes wrote about a man captured by Natives Americans.
• Madeline was our first participant to write in verse!!!!

Story to follow some time today!!!!