Mung the mercyless

I’ve been a Citizen Journalist now since the beginning of the year and I have had zero success financially from this endeavour.

I have submitted news stories to London’s premiere freesheet, the Metro, I have dabbled with the concept of self-publishing a freesheet adult paper for commuters, I dreamt up Braille porn for the blind and also came up with the innovative concept of books that present a transliteration of blockbuster movies that were not themselves originally based on books.

Nothing.

I remain, however, as ever on the look-out for new ideas and recently stumbled across a new and exciting opportunity: Children’s literature. I love kids (although I couldn’t eat a whole one ;-) and I even used to be a child, so I’ve got literally years of experience in the field. So writing children’s literature should be a doddle. After all, they don’t really understand long words and I know the meaning of countless long words. Like transliteration, I mean how many kids know what that means?

Anyway, the reason I thought I might try and pen a kiddy tail is news from the Secret Seed Society that they’re taking entries for a forthcoming book. If you don’t believe me, have a look here:

They’re running a competition to find the best kids story based on the adventures of a personified mung bean. If you ask me the old hippies that run the show have doubtless been on the wackie-baccie a bit too much, but still, the winner gets £700 and so it’s got to be worth a shot, right?

If you too fancy taking up the challenge the website sets out the criteria nicely:

• Audience: 3-9 year olds and those that read with them.


• Lead Character: A Mung Bean. Alliterate the name. Mung is the surname. The character should face 'real life' dilemmas, situations or decisions.


• Seed City: An urban environment where our characters live and hangout: Environments so far the Allotments The City Farm, Leafy Lane Park, The Bandstand. Please feel free to develop your own and include those that already exist.


• Drama: Challenges, adventures and wonders of living within an active urban community. These should be real human issues with a sprinkle of fantasy.


• Other Characters: Feel free to create new characters to animate your story, we like to have the relationships of family, friends and community in our books. We can help with casting inline with the Seed City characters once the narrative story is developed.


• Extra points: Hidden depth to the story. A moral. Use of simple and rhythmic, poetic or idiomatic language.


• Format: 500 - 700 words, divided in to 12 chunks ('spreads' if you’ve done this before) that will be integrated in to double paged illustrations.


• Submissions: By email to menka@secretseedsociety.com. The story must be in text in the main body of the email, so those of our judges who are out and about in the wilder parts of the UK have a chance to read your story via their phones.


• Deadline: Latest entry 5pm, 20th July 2009, but the sooner the better, we read them when we get them.
  

So there you have it readers. I’ve got under a week to come up with a story for Menka at the Secret Seed Society. And so do you if you’re reading this blog and fancy a shot!

Get scribbin’