Other-worldly Monsters

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: Extra Terrestrials

Space aliens are fear of the unknown, creatures with more intelligence, different intelligence, better than us, more progressed than us evolutionarily and technically, a combination of giant insect, mermaids, were-creatures, future tech, etc. Fear of aliens has also mashed up with religious fears: what if angels and demons were actually visits from aliens? What if the first humans were actually aliens, or created by aliens. What if all life on Earth was seeded by aliens? Ideas of alien life are the ultimate game of What if and what if, but why, in our stories are visiting aliens usually out to kill us. They either want to eat us, steal our planet and enslave us, or both?

Many say as writers we are the god of the worlds we create. Even if we are not writing sci-fi or fantasy, we create the life in our stories, we create the nature, the relationships, the stumbling blocks, the impossible choices, everything. We  create the fears and what effects those fears have. 

You might find some other-worldly inspiration at Roswell’s International UFO Museum (this is a 360° virtual museum. I love these.)

OctPoWriMo

If you read a lot of older poetry, you may notice that many poems didn’t have titles, only numbers, or were the same as the first or last line. These days, titles are expected to not only grab a reader’s attention, they are expected to do work. How does a title do work? A title may:

• Orient the reader: in space and time, or introduce the character or speaker and what they’re doing
• Allude to a story or myth
• Set the tone
• Offer interpretive framework
• Create a Striking Contrast
• Provide a revelation about what the poem is about that the reader won’t understand until they’ve read the poem

With all these ideas in mind, after you write your poem, don’t just throw your first idea for a title at the top. List as many possible titles as you can think of and go for the one that makes the reader re-read the title, say “Aha”, and want to read the poem again.

Example poem: “The Abduction” by Stanley Kunitz from Poets.org

The Abduction

Some things I do not profess
to understand, perhaps
not wanting to, including
whatever it was they did
with you or you with them
that timeless summer day
when you stumbled out of the wood,
distracted, with your white blouse torn
and a bloodstain on your skirt.
“Do you believe?” you asked.
Between us, through the years,
we pieced enough together
to make the story real:
how you encountered on the path
a pack of sleek, grey hounds,
trailed by a dumbshow retinue
in leather shrouds; and how
you were led, through leafy ways,
into the presence of a royal stag,
flaming in his chestnut coat,
who kneeled on a swale of moss
before you; and how you were borne
aloft in triumph through the green,
stretched on his rack of budding horn,
till suddenly you found yourself alone
in a trampled clearing.

That was a long time ago,
almost another age, but even now,
when I hold you in my arms,
I wonder where you are.
Sometimes I wake to hear
the engines of the night thrumming
outside the east bay window
on the lawn spreading to the rose garden.
You lie beside me in elegant repose,
a hint of transport hovering on your lips,
indifferent to the harsh green flares
that swivel through the room,
searchlights controlled by unseen hands.
Out there is a childhood country,
bleached faces peering in
with coals for eyes.
Our lives are spinning out
from world to world;
the shapes of things
are shifting in the wind.
What do we know
beyond the rapture and the dread?
~Stanley Kunitz

What work is the title doing for this poem? Without the title, would you have understood the poem differently?

Prompt: Write a poem about hearing someone else’s monster encounter. Do you believe them? Or just play along? What convinces you, or doesn’t? End the poem with an open-ended question?

Possible form: Narrative poem

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Twenty-nine 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.

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.

Songs to get us moving: