Writober 2025: Our Deepest Fears>Prompt Post
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🔗Links in the Table of Contents are Jump links to each of the challenges to navigate easily to the prompt of your interest: OctPoWriMo for poetry; Writober Flash Fiction for flash fiction; Halloween Photography Challenge for photography
🐦⬛Example poems are copied here for educational purposes.
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🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge
Today’s Theme: Blood
We need blood moving around inside our bodies to live, so it’s scary to see blood. When we see blood, that means it has escaped its system, and a living creature is nearer to death. Because blood is so necessary for life, it has connotations as a substance that contains our spirit or life-force. This connection between blood and mortality led to beliefs that drinking blood could lead to immortality.
Did you know the first vampire was inspired by a poet? This year I found out that the first published story about a vampire, called “The Vampyre” (1819) by John Polidori, was inspired by the poet Lord Byron. Not only was the story based on a story Lord Byron told as part of a challenge at a party, his charismatic, romantic, and morally-complex personality inspired the character Lord Ruthven the seductive vampire in the story.
You may find some inspiration at the online Blood exhibit at Science Museum.
OctPoWriMo
How do we get under the skin with our poetry? Using word choice to create a mood? Creating a rhythm that makes the heart race? Making shocking statements that make the blood boil? How can you make today’s poem pulse?
Example Poem: “The True Lover” by A. E. Houseman from Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre(Aal)
The True Lover
The lad came to the door at night,
When lovers crown their vows,
And whistled soft and out of sight
In shadow of the boughs.
‘I shall not vex you with my face
Henceforth, my love, for aye;
So take me in your arms a space
Before the east is grey.
‘When I from hence away am past
I shall not find a bride,
And you shall be the first and last
I ever lay beside.’
She heard and went and knew not why;
Her heart to his she laid;
Light was the air beneath the sky
But dark under the shade.
‘Oh do you breathe, lad, that your breast
Seems not to rise and fall,
And here upon my bosom prest
There beats no heart at all?’
‘Oh loud, my girl, it once would knock,
You should have felt it then;
But since for you I stopped the clock
It never goes again.’
‘Oh lad, what is it, lad that drips
Wet from your neck on mine?
What is it falling on my lips,
My lad, that tastes of brine?’
Oh like enough ’tis blood, my dear,
For when the knife has slit
The throat across from ear to ear
‘Twill bleed because of it.’
Under the stars the air was light
But dark below the boughs,
The still air of the speechless night,
When lovers crown their vows.
~A. E. Housman
Prompt: Write a poem using blood as a symbol for life, a romantic encounter, and/or death.
Possible Poetic form: Four line stanzas (quatrains) with the rhyme scheme ABAB.
Writober Flash Fiction Challenge
Click on the link and take a look at the image. How might this image relate to today’s theme? Write a piece of flash fiction, anything from a six-word story to 999 words. Feel free to bring in the OctPoWriMo prompt and the Photography Challenge prompt, anything that inspires your story.
Halloween Photography Challenge
Here’s an interesting take on the vampire myth- a vampire ghost:
Thank you so much for joining me for this year’s October challenges. Remember to support each other by visiting and commenting on as many links as you can as we explore our Deepest Fears in anticipation of Halloween.
If you enjoy these posts and the work I do here, please head to my buymeacoffee page and show your support! Thank you so much. Every bit helps keep this site going.
Music to get us moving:
Experience Writing 
OctPoWriMo Day 5. The Ritual of Leaving
~ Oizys.
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