Spooky said he can’t wait to wipe the floor with you all, so I’m here to officially announce the Turbo Survivor game, slated to start at some point after this one is over.  I mentioned this a couple months ago, but I’ll recap the rules again.

–We will play approximately two weeks for every calendar week.  I will probably not set a calendar for every week ahead of time.  If things come up in my personal life, I’ll need some flexibility so I have more than a three hour window to judge if necessary.  I would like people to have 3 days for each challenge, plus at least a full day for judging and voting.  Regardless, it will be fast.

–You will get a set period of time in which to write your story.  This will vary between thirty minutes to three hours.  However, YOU get to pick that time slot.

–Any time during the “week” you can e-mail me that you are ready.  The only thing you will know ahead of time is the time allotted that week to write.

–My e-mail account will send an auto-reply back to you with the challenge.  If the time limit that week is one hour, you will have one hour from the time the auto-reply was sent to you to complete your story.  Timestamps will be crucial.  The huge benefit of auto-reply is that you can write any time you want, day or night, without pre-approval.

–The challenges will be short, probably starting with less than 100 words, topping out at 500 as we go along.  An example of a challenge might be:  ”Write a love story in 200 words or less where a toaster is featured prominently.”  Or:  ”In 50 words or less, come up with a creative way to tell Nibbish to suck it.”

–As non-subs would hopefully be minimal (right, guys?), scoring would likely be on a forced curve.  Results would be posted as soon as possible and you will have about 24 hours to make your votes.  The following day, the next “week” will begin.  Again, all you will know is the time limit until you send me your e-mail that you’re ready to begin.

–I realize that it would be possible for people to cheat by doing the challenge early in the week, then letting a teammate or alliance know what they’ll have to write about.  However, in the spirit of the game, and because you are all awesome, I would expect that nobody would do that.

–I realize some of you may be hesitant to play because your time slots are unpredictable, probably due to kids or other family things.  Like if you have a thirty minute challenge, and as soon as you start your kid starts crying and it’s your turn to rock him to sleep.  Or whatever it is you parents do to those guys.  To persuade some of you to play, I would give each person one free pass chip over the course of the game, which you can use for any reason.  However, you would have to claim it within one hour of your original deadline.  So no starting your story at 12:01 on the first day, then giving me your pass chip at 8:00 pm the second night to give yourself two days to think of something.  For those who don’t have an emergency of some sort come up during the course of the game, you could of course use your pass chip to give yourself extra time on a challenge.

–I would also allow players to skip one challenge during the game, in order to allow people to go on vacations.  If you take a two-week trip, well then I hope you get sunburned (and you probably wouldn’t want to play unless you had internet access on your trip).

–In addition to immunities, I am considering offering chances for players to win additional time tokens.  For example, if you won a thirty minute time token, you could use it in a future week to give yourself an extra thirty minutes on the challenge.  You can turn in your time card any time before your time slot has expired.

–Depending on number of people signed up, there will be teams and all the hoopla that comes with them.

Rhubarb had suggested people being able to bank time to use in following weeks.  I can see this being abused.  For example, if a player knows via his alliance that he’s not going to get voted out that week no matter what happens, he could submit a really crappy story in one minute, giving himself 59 minutes of bank to use at a later week.  I know there are other ways to consider it, but I’d rather not award people for not using the full time to make their story the best it can be.

So, if you sign up, I want you to answer the following questions:

1.  What week would you like to start?
2.  Do you have any planned vacations that could interfere?  If so, what week?
3.  Will you only play if there is a set schedule each week?  (remember, you will only need about an hour most of the time)
3a. If yes, can you only write on weekends?
4.  How many days do you feel is necessary to have for writing?
5.  Any other problems you forsee that could be worked around with a rule change?

MY FAVORITE PEOPLE

Kelly Wells
Will Young
Erik Sundberg
Matt Novak
Colin Woolston
Sarah Bizek
Peter Bruzek
Zillah Glory
Tanya Laumann
Brooks Maki
Zack Sauvageau
Ryan Sorrell
Miriam Metwaly
Bret Highum
Cory Funk
Shawn Ashley
Peggy Sorrell
Tom Morgan
AMR
Don Campbell
Sarah Wreisner Johnson
Rose Devitt