I don’t usually enter caption competitions, mostly because the pictures involved fail to interest me (at least within the time frame of the contest), but one of the images Tiffany provided at her blog did suggest a storyline to me. “The Corporate Ladder” was the result. Enjoy!
Tiffany Manners is a prolific creator of TG captions. In spite of the fact that she uses way too many exclamation marks, and that she’s a bit of a drama queen (which I say with affection), I enjoy her work. I appreciate her taste in imagery (except the graphic photos, which are thankfully rare), her endless inventiveness, and the enthusiasm she brings to the table.
One piece of advice, Tiff. You might want to tone down the threats to stop captioning, if you don’t get enough feedback. We all know you’ll never do it; you’ve cried wolf too often already. Everyone who shares their work on the Internet feels your frustration: so many clicks, so little feedback. You’ll be that much happier, grasshopper, once you learn to accept the silence.
Amanda
Update: October 10, 2012
Tiffany has shut down her blog, so I removed the links from this post.
She took this step because she was (understandably) frustrated at the lack of feedback her captions generated, and she is apparently hoping to continue captioning in private, using email for distribution. For the record, I believe that she’s making a mistake. Imagine a small business with no storefront and no advertising; how long would it stay in business? Her initial group is bound to wither over time (for any number of reasons), and with no way to replace them, sadly, it’s likely she’ll end up more disillusioned than before.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with trying to do something different. Ditto for trying to encourage people to participate. The mistake lies in cutting herself off from the outside world. She could have used her blog to entice people to join her private group, perhaps by posting a subset of the captions being created, or by posting low-res versions. Her decision to instead raise the drawbridge is a small loss for the TG community, but a much greater loss for the person we knew as Tiffany Manners.
Amanda's Reading Room 
That is a really great cap!
Thanks!
We read ’em even if we aren’t certain what exactly to say about them. Fun story. Your style of lots of small text comments rather than a single blockier text comment or two is different that what I usually see. I’m sorry you’re frustrated with it. Hundreds of thousands of hits probably shouldn’t be thought of as silence so much as the sound of constant clicking, like cicadas in summer, or a broken fan spinning, occasionally broken by a “good job” or “nice cap” or “fun story.”
Hey, I like the sound of that! Constant clicking brings to mind a busy office scene in an old movie, or some of the modern offices I’ve worked in myself. Lots of activity beneath the surface, with flashes of light here and there, like the tiny whitecaps atop ocean waves. (There I go, mixing my metaphors again.)
I appreciate your concern, but I’m really not all that frustrated. Not anymore. I know how it is, and in particular how the TG community works. I believe the right approach is to share as widely as possible and let the responses trickle in as they may (or may not). I have enough confidence in my work to know that it’s good, without having to be told. I’m not an attention-seeker. I’m just a writer.