In this week's contest: Channel your inner Dante and suggest a "circle of hell" for people who do some "evil" (probably more like annoying) thing, and suggest what the culprit would experience there, as in the examples in this week's Invitational appearing in Gene Weingarten's Feb. 2 Substack column, The Gene Pool, at GeneWeingarten.substack.com.
Type as many as 25 entries in the area below where it says "Your answer." It's best to copy them in from another document so you'll have them if your computer suddenly dies or something, or if you click to submit the form and something goes wonky.
HOW TO FORMAT YOUR ENTRIES: Write each one of your entries as one continuous line; in other words, DON'T put the "crime" on one line, press Enter, and put the "punishment" on the next line. Just write each entry as a single paragraph. Otherwise they'll be scattered to the winds when the Empress shuffles everyone's entries into one big alphabetical anonymous list.
But please put space between entries. Note: Your auto-reply confirmation might be missing formatting, with everything squished into one big blob of text, but it seems that it's nothing to worry about; the entries have been coming out fine on this end..
Entry deadline is one moment before midnight on Friday, Feb. 10. Results will be posted in Gene's chat on Thursday, Feb. 16. Entries will sometimes be edited by the Empress and/or Czar for space, taste and just better wording of the joke. Unfortunately, time doesn’t permit full consultations about every editing tweak.
Every entry will be personally read and ruminated on (ewwww!) every week by either the Czar or the Empress or, when there's time, by both of us.
