2011 Challenger: Alex Blinkoff
Let me see if I’ve got this right.
My name is Alexander David Blinkoff. I am 16 going on 17, and I live in a neighborhood in Baltimore where there are three synagogues within walking distance of my houses. By day, I am a boisterous clown known for his moments of pensiveness in the middle of silly situations.
But by night, I transform into my alter ego, Punch Rockgroin, MST3K reference and Silver Age supervillain. Except not really. Despite the elaborate time-traveling backstory I conceived for him,  Punch Rockgroin remains far away from my writing . He’s simply too ridiculous to exist, even in that form.
A brief history of my writing career. In January of 2010, I was assigned a one page story that retold the classic fairy tale of Cinderella from another perspective. Â Being the sort of person who overdoes things, I penned a (actually rather awful, but that’s beside the point) tale about a half demon who sacrificed his mother to Satan so he could become one of the Four Horsemen.
A wise man may or may not have said something like “Don’t let something like a lack of talent stop you from doing what you love.” Taking that to heart, I set to work on a novel. The humorous fantasy, while relatively funny, lacked intricacies like an interesting plot or good characters. While I had several novel ideas (and I still do, more than I can count,) only one has ever begun to materialize.
I had long since toyed with the idea of a war going on between two poorly armed but zealous factions in an enclosed space. The idea started as two schools, before evolving into a valley social experiment. That evolved into two micro-nations made up of refugees from some cataclysmic event. I picked and chose from all the favorite characters I had come up with (the obsessive-compulsive genius who hates nothing more than losing, the noble but reckless boy with serious anger issues, the strong-willed but naive tomboy who mistrusts everyone she meets, and the outwardly angelic but inwardly fiery and vicious girl,) plopped them into a valley, gave them a good reason to fight, and let them have at it.
When I’m not working on the novel, which is going quite well, thank you for asking, I’m dreaming up new and exciting scenarios. Some common themes in my writing:
- Cold War analogues
- History jokes no one but me finds funny
- Unnamed characters (because I suck huge elephant dick at naming characters)
- Doing my best not to rip off things I like
- Grey morality (oh god this though)
- Trying not to write fantasy
- Fight scenes, I still haven’t got the memo fights don’t really work in a printed medium
- Superheroes
- Deserts
- Â Hating everything I write three months after I write it.
Not that anyone is going to read this, but if by some strange and wonderful miracle you are, hello! I hope you enjoy whatever characters I come up with, even if I run out of ideas and quit by day 10!
Category: Participants