The anniversary is drawing closer and the Dedes are still trying to come up with a catchy idea to celebrate. Mouse suggested writing a summary of the highlights of last year. She loves writing and would be happy to do the extra work. But Devil couldn’t see how the readers could participate. This was the most important requirement – our readers should be able to take part. He suggested having a gallery of the best images on face book and asking the viewers to vote on which one was the best. This idea didn’t fly at all. Mouse pointed out that there are only 14 fans on face book, and anyway, the celebration was clearly about the Dede puppet blog being one year old.
Alien listened to their argument and said: “Why don’t we combine your two ideas? Look, we know that my photograph was the best one last year anyway.”
“Who says?” asked Devil. “I know a few images of me which are equally good!”
“Don’t start arguing again, Devil” Mouse begged. But Alien held his hand up and explained: “Leopoldine said so. She won the postcards in the Super Dede competition. One of the postcards had this photograph, and she told us that I am her absolute favourite.”
“So what do you want to do then? I can’t really see where you are going with this…”
“I didn’t like the story that went with the photograph” Alien continued. “Let our readers invent a new story for it.”
“Ha, that is so silly. You can’t just invent a new story. What has been, has been!” Devil laughed out loud.
“Can’t you? Where I come from we do it all the time. If you don’t like your history you just re-write it!
“That is rather an alien concept” Mouse said. “But why not give it a go?” All the Dedes present turned their heads towards me and waited for my approval. After all, it was my story in the first place. “Go for it” I said. “I think it is a brilliant idea. It’s definitely worth a try!”
Mouse made a few notes on her pad. She is not the most creative one, but she is really good in picking up ideas and seeing them through. “Okay” she said after a while and ripped out the page from her note pad to pin up on the wall. It outlined the rules for the competition. Mouse’s scrawly handwriting is difficult to decipher, so I’ll type out what she had written here:
We would like to invite all our friends to celebrate one year of Dede puppet blogging by having a story-telling competition.
Rules for the story-telling competition
Everybody who wants to take part should copy the image above onto their blog and invent a new story to go with it.
Please send us a link to your blog, so that the Dedes and all our fans can read your story.
First prize: an autographed copy of ‘Hermit’s Web’ the original Dede puppet book.
Second and third prize: One set of 10 Dede puppet postcards each.
The stories can be written in English or German. Should a German story win, we will translate and post it on this blog here for all our fans to read. If an English story wins, we will re-blog and translate it on our German blog.
Competition ends 4th of March 2013 (midnight NZ).
We are looking forward to your stories!
—
“Oh I am so excited, I am so excited” Alien danced around the table “I will get a new story!”.
“What happens if nobody takes part?” asked Devil
“We have at least tried!” Mouse replied.
dedepuppets 
A very good idea!
Thanks. I hope Buchalov has a nice Alien story to tell :)
Thats not easy, but I will try.
We shall see what happens, but should celebrations be occasions for competitions?
Ah yes, calling it a competition is a bit unfortunate. I wanted our friends to engage a little more and it is a test for the exhibition – I was wondering if it would work to have one image up and invite visitors to come up with a story for it. But I guess a full story will be too demanding. I am now thinking about creating one of those stories where everybody only adds one sentence and we see where it takes us. But it is all still very vague in my head.
That’s is interesting…sort of like the “Exquisite Corpse” game some of the Surrealists used to play, but instead of creating a drawing…a story comes out of it. There is also a parlor game where a story is whispered into the ear of one person who then repeats the story to the next. By the time the story gets back around it has completely changed from the original.