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. Especially after that hiatus I took when we couldn’t log on and comment because of some issue involving the server, the Russians, Keebler elves, or something. Anyway, that’s resolved, and big thanks to Internet Dad and everyone else who worked tirelessly and without pay to provide our continuing free entertainment. Anyway, 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 is one that was actually done at KSK, but which I was reminded of because of someone’s pick in the last mock draft: Pick A Book You Would Make Into a Movie. For purposes of this draft, “book” will include short stories. It will not include comic books. Nothing against comics, it’s just that there’s no shortage of movies based on comics, and if by chance the comic you loved as a kid hasn’t hit the sliver screen yet, it’s probably in post-production as you read this.

Which brings us to the second rule: Your book/short story cannot have been a movie before. Just because you didn’t like the cinemafication of your favorite book doesn’t mean you get to make a remake of it.

Third rule, which isn’t mandatory: cast your movie, at least the leads. Or don’t. I just think it’s a fun little twist, and makes you think.

With the first pick in this draft, I select Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut, a short story by Stephen King in which an unhappily married woman becomes obsessed with finding short-cuts. She cuts more and more time from her trips, until it becomes obvious that she is “folding the map”, and somehow crossing dimensions and/or alternate realities while traveling. As she does she becomes younger, and when the narrator finally joins her, it seems he does the same in the last brief glimpse we get of him. It’s a tightly told story with a definitive ending that not only makes sense, it’s hopeful and uplifting. King’s books as movies are generally disastrous, imo, but I’d love to see this story in the hands of a director sure enough of himself to hew to the story without doing anything stupid to it. Diane Lane as Mrs. Todd, Richard Jenkins as Homer, the narrator. I originally had Julianne Moore and James Cromwell, but looked up their ages and felt they were just a tad outside what I was looking for. Line for age discrimination lawsuits starts on the left.

Fun fact, the featured image certainly implies that Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut was a movie, however after doing some panicked investigation it seems that’s something someone who also would like it to be made a movie made up: there is no mention of any such movie on imdb, nor does it appear on Jodie Foster’s (also a good pick for Mrs. Todd), list of roles, and at that point I said “good enough” and ran with it.

Your commissioner, it should come as no surprise, appears here:

Make with the picks, you hyper-literate degenerates!