One of the biggest things I miss from our old site was the mock drafts that used to run every Friday.  Those were fantastic time wasters, and a good one was a virtual guarantee that you were going to be far from productive at work, as your day instead degenerated into arguments with strangers over who would be the best Saturday cartoon character to have sex with, (and now we all know how that would go), or some other equally inane topic, all of which were still more important than that TPS report deadline your boss was yelling about.  Good times.

Well, it’s been long enough.  After a discussion in the back channels yours truly is bringing it back, with some slight rule changes.  The old site had 4-5 main contributors, one of whom may not have been real.  So they’d do 2-3 rounds themselves, then kick it to the kommentariat to draft whatever was left over.  You can do that when you’ve only taken 10-15 of whatever topic was up for drafting.  We, however, are a much more connected group when it comes to the writin’ and draftin’ of things, so if we did that we’d easily take out 30-50 before we threw the bedraggled leftovers to our beloved readership.  That’s no fun.  So these drafts, which I expect to last as long as I remember to do them, (2-3 weeks), will just leap right into it.

Also, for content and alliteration reasons, we’ve moved the draft to Monday mornings, so get ready to kill your productivity right from the start.

Yours in the comments, first come, first served.  For now, please wait 10 picks or 30 minutes before making another one.  That will be revised up or down depending on how much participation we get, which I hope will be a lot.

This Week’s Category:  The book/novel/short story universe that you would most like to live in and why.  Now, before you get all mad about there apparently being an essay portion to this draft, just know that this week’s topic came from the, uh, ‘fertile’ imagination of our resident homelessness prevention specialist, Scotchnaut, and he can probably figure out where you live.  That said, let’s get to this week’s commissioner and the rules.

Greetings, I’m CS Lewis.  You may know me as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, a fantasy series that is not even barely disguised as Christian mythology, a point that is neither here nor there.  A point that is not only here, but also there, (a point beaten absolutely to death in said Chronicles), is that I invented an entire world, Narnia and surrounding lands, as the setting for my story.  In this draft you will be selecting similar worlds, maybe even Narnia, as a story universe you would like to live in.

1.  You may pick any fictional universe, so long as it appears on the written page in one form or another.  In another words, nerds, you can draft something from the Marvel Universe, because it is fictional, and it does appear in written form.  Any story universe that only appears in film it out.  Figure it out as you go.
2. You cannot take an entire universe with one pick.  In other words, you can’t say “The Marvel Universe” and prevent anyone else from taking any other part of the MCU.  Perhaps a better example would be if you were to, citing the works of my contemporary, JRR Tolkien, draft “Middle Earth”, that you trigger my appearance and a remonstrance that you would need to pick a specific portion of Middle Earth, such as the Shire, Moria, Mordor, or whatever your nerdish mind comes up with.  In short, (too late!), be specific and don’t be greedy.
3. There is no third rule.  Those two are it.  Go forth and abuse that Homer Simpson “Nerrrrrrrrrrrd” gif like we all know you will.

Since Scotchnaut came up with this idea, the first pick is his.  Scotchy, have at it.