Fear from Out of Space

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: Eldritch Horror

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” ~William Shakespeare Hamlet _(Aal)(Act 1, Scene 5)

Our deepest fear, after we have faced every fear and conquered or made friends with it, is one that we can never know. That is why poetry is never dead no matter what anyone says, there is always something more to explore that cannot be answered. We can say that fear is what happens to our thinking mind that defines us after we die, or it can be what is going on in all the simultaneous dimensions we aren’t experiencing, or it can be the ever present question, Do we have free will? What it all adds up to is The unknown.

Though in Lovecraftian horror these creatures from the unknown cause madness in their witnesses, as writers we see the unknown as the playground of the imagination. Yes, write what you know in terms of exploring sensory details and imagery. Then use those specific details of experience to describe the surprising or even the impossible. Compare and contrast known sensory experiences with those life-changing events that can’t be explained. Take the leap from the daily mundane that everyone can relate to, to those fantastic moments that we can barely believe happened even though we experienced them.

You may find inspiration at The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society.

OctPoWriMo

This year, James Wyman of Burlington Writers Workshop is offering a poetry 101 course, for free. When he sent out the syllabus he recommended we read Perrine’s Sound and Sense_(Aal). It’s a wonderful, intense “Introduction to Poetry,” and I wish I had read it years ago. The title is from a poem called Sound and Sense by Alexander Pope.

A poet has a full tool box to for commanding the sounds of language to imbue each line with mystery and emotion. The work of the poet is to use these tools to match sound and sense: to make the poem sing with its meaning.

Example Poem: “Lightning ” by Mary Oliver from American Primitive_(Aal)

Lightning

The oaks shone
gaunt gold
on the lip
of the storm before
the wind rose,
the shapeless mouth
opened and began
its five-hour howl;
the lights
went out fast, branches
sidled over
the pitch of the roof, bounced
into the yard
that grew black
within mintes, except
for the lightning—the landscape
bulging forth like a quick
lesson in creation, then
thudding away. Inside,
as always,
it was hard to tell
fear from excitement:
how sensal
the lightning’s
poured stroke! and still,
what a fire and a risk!
As always the body wants to hide,
wants to flow toward it—strives
to balance while
fear shouts,
excitement
shouts, back
and forth—each
bolt a burning river
tearing like escape through the dark
field of the other.

~Mary Oliver

How do the sounds of these words in these lines convey the meaning of the poem?

Prompt: Think of the onset of a specific fear. Write a poem using short, punchy phrases to express the immediacy and speed for which we feel fear.

Possible form: The Blitz poem

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Thirty 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.

Music to get us moving: