A Howl in the Moonlight

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: Transformation

As we work to write more deeply through our daily practice and exploration, our personal experiences with fear may also bring up our most transformative moments. Change, both physical and emotional is scary. And acting in the face of fear can lead to lasting change.

The werewolf (or changing into any were-creature) represents our fear of our own violent inner nature; our fear of losing self-control. It also represents our relationship with the moon’s monthly cycles.

We may not have turned into were-creatures, sprouting fangs and claws, but we did grow hair, change shape, and start responding to pheromones. Other than puberty, what other times have you felt like a were-creature, completely transformed?

I found this in my post from April, Transformation: So why are we so resistant to change? Fear of loss. Research has shown that fear of loss is twice as powerful as the joy of gain. Fear of losing the safety of what we know wins out over the hope of positive change in the unknown. But as long as we continue to want to change and see set-backs as a natural part of the cyclical nature of change, transformation can be achieved.

OctPoWriMo

In the compressed space of a poem, every word is very important and often does the work of many words. Poets love words with many meanings, and words that can be multiple forms of speech (nouns, verbs, and/or adjectives at the same time). If each word is so important, why would we use repetition? How does the same phrase or line transform as it’s repeated?

Example Poem: “The Wolves of Egremont” by Dorothy Quick from Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre_(Aal)

The Wolves of Egremont

Beware the wolves of Egremont,
The wolves that prowl night after night;
Beware the wolves by any light
But surely when the moon is bright.

Beware the wolves of Egremont,
The wolves that run in deadly pack,
That wait in ambush to attack
And torture surely as the rack.

Beware the wolves of Egremont,
The wolves that run by night and day,
Who, when you hunt, are far away—
The wolves that only blood can stay.

Beware the wolves of Egremont;
The wolf pack numbers more than ten,
But others join them in their den.
These gaunt, gray wolves that once were men
The wolves of Egremont!

~Dorothy Quick

What effect does the repeated warning have? How does fear build in this poem?

Prompt: Write a poem of warning. Start each stanza with your warning. Leave an important detail until the end.

Possible form: Kyrielle

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Seventeen Image

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

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.

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Songs to get us moving: