Story [Penguins of Madagascar] August 21 Is Fanfiction Writers Appreciation Day

Title: Fanfiction Writers Appreciation Day Is August 21

Author: pronker

Rating: G

Summary: Go forth tomorrow and be fruitful with comments on stories you like! It won't hurt, I promise, even if the fic is so old it's creaky. Plus, it's Eclipse Day! Bring a little sunshine into someone's life!

A/N So this is a twofer: I forgot about the Bulwer-Lytton Contest this year to result in this tardy entry, and according to Barduil on tumblr (who goes by many names) August 21st is Fanfiction Appreciation Day. Please see summary.

EAD: Title was actually Fanfiction Writers Appreciation Day, oops.

IOIOIOIOIO

It was a dark and stormy night when Rico discovered the interroBANG from Phil --- The Chimp Who Can Read --- and afterwards, dear reader, nothing could extinguish the explosives expert's upsurge in ambition to master the alphabet, for it is in fanfiction that his story lies, boosted at its end with the aforementioned non-standard punctuation mark that I cannot reproduce here because of the limited nature of my word processor, but Rico could, ¡verdad?

IOIOIOIOIO

The End

 

Oh this was a treat, as always.

 

Glad you enjoyed it! The whole thing about the penguins being illiterate is a mine for fanfic gold.

 

I don't get it.

 

I usually enter the Bulwer-Lytton Contest annually, and in 2017 forgot: Bulwer-Lytton was a 19th century novelist famous for huge paras, nearly a wall o'text, with copious use of purple prose and semi-colons. I've only read Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and it's heavy going. I liked it, though, as both historical fiction and historical historical fiction. The "It was a dark and stormy night" first line of his Paul Clifford (1830) got famous when Charles Schultz's Peanuts comic strip dog, Snoopy, kept starting his novel with that phrase about 1971. A CA professor started a bad lit contest about 1983 that's grown with the years - it's a hoot! If you follow the link, there's more info re the contest. Some of the entries are surreal, and many follow the 'breaking the fourth wall' conceit: "limited nature of my word processor."

As for the entry, Rico loves explosives, can't read just like all others on his team, and wants to be literate and use in his fic an interrobang, the combination of question mark and exclamation point, that, I dunno, is some punctuation mark just for fun, maybe? Anyway, a few fonts carry it and the "verdad" at fic's end shows my learning in the Dark Ages our Spanish teacher's explanation of the inverted interrobang that consists of an inverted question mark or exclamation point at either end of a phrase, depending on whether one wants to convey a shocked question or a horrified, disbelieving interjection. This saves, you know, the whole hunting for a font that supports interrobangs.

The Fanfiction Writers Appreciation Day is today,

And wow, we got to see a stupendous eclipse this morning! It was inspiring and made one feel small, always a good thing. Double wow, this lengthy explanation is contest-worthy, except the guidelines suggest keeping it to 50-60 words. Plus it needs more semi-colons.

 

Thanks! It was fun to write meta-ishly; HTML ‽ is the code for playing around to see if one's font supports the interrobang.