Skip to main content

Irony, a Tweet and a Prize

When I was in my last year of high school, I suffered through English Lit.

For someone who loves writing, I suffered exquisitely, with all the analytical stuff asphyxiating all the creative joy out of the subject.

A friend in a different English class to me was given - of all things - a creative writing assignment, on one of their literature textbook themes of "irony". I remember being both jealous and baffled - jealous that the other class got to do some creative writing, and baffled about how one would write a story on "irony".

I've never quite forgotten it. From time to time, I've thought about how I would go about writing a story on "irony". Or, I've encountered instances of irony and thought, 'now, there's a way to write that irony story'. Never quite written the quintessential irony story yet, though.


So, anyway, a couple of weeks ago, @Logitech pinged me on Twitter to let me know they were again running their Twitter #vss (very short story) competition, together with the original microfic magician, @veryshortstory. They pinged me because the last time they held the comp, I entered enthusiastically (albeit with no success) because, as I've said many times before, I adore microfics.

I skimmed the competition guidelines and laughed when I realised the theme for their final week (that I was just in time for) was "isn't it ironic".

I didn't know that I was going to bother entering, but the lure of wrestling with that long-ago theme in my favourite format was too much to resist.

I managed to get two entries in:

The colder and more distant they grew towards each other, the more they compensated by holidaying together in every-warmer places. #LogiVss

and

Her imagination was ordered by grammar & punctuation, dictated to by fashion, stalked by logic and hunted down by others' opinions #LogiVSS


To my enormous surprise, a week later, I received this:



And this one:


And guess what arrived in the mail less than a week later? Today, in fact?


My prize!

I'm still giggling incredulously. I won something - that I'm now holding in my hands - with a tweet. A K780 Logitech keyboard! I'm holding this because of a tweet!

I am extremely, completely and utterly delighted, thrilled and overjoyed. It's a beautiful looking device too, and I'm SO looking forward to playing with it. Thank you Logitech :)

It's a wonderful sequence of events - the irony themes, irony tweets and a lovely prize. It's all wonderfully ironic, actually.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Getting the Right Accent

There was a Twitter hashtag which did the rounds recently: #tweetjustyourvoice. The idea was to use record an audio of your voice with a visual that didn’t include your face, and then post it onto Twitter so that your communities of tweeps (Twitter folk) get to hear how you sound. I would have probably continued on my merry way, happily ignorant of all things connected to this hashtag, except that it got embraced with gusto by the FridayPhrases community , with a certain FridayPhrases host (the very persuasive @AdeleSGray ) inviting me to take part. If ever there was a hashtag designed to wallop me well out of my comfort zone, it was this one. Why? Thank you for asking. There are several reasons.

The Sun and the Moon

The following little story came to me while driving home one night on a dark road lit up in silver by a half-moon.  I suddenly had a fanciful little image of a car smilingly gobbling up a crescent-shaped sliver of moon-flake which helped its headlights shine brighter.  Such an image wouldn't normally find a home outside my head, but

I got locked out of Twitter

So. On Sunday morning, I was up at my usual pre-dawn hour. After a Saturday of clouds and rain, when Sunday started with golden pre-dawn light, the birds got very excited and had a glorious symphony of chirruping-chitter-chatter and clear calls to each other. I put down my teacup and slipped into the cold outside to record a soothing 13-odd seconds of it.  Social media might appreciate this lovely clip of peace and zen, I thought, and shared it to Twitter and Instagram.  Well. Within 30 seconds, Twitter got its knickers in a supreme knot about the video, declared I'd violated their rules, and locked me out of my account for 12 hours.  For the record, here's the offending vid: Now, I'm the mildest of the mild social media users, focusing exclusively on things that interest me like writing, creativity, nature and animals. In other words, I don't go near the creepy edges of content that might violate Twitter ToS. Being locked out was absolutely a new experience for me. It&