Experience Writing

Writober 2025: Our Deepest Fears>Prompt Post

🔗Post contains Amazon associate links (shown with Aal in parentheses)
🔗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.
🖼️I made these banners from my photos and free for commercial use fonts. Feel free to use them in your posts.

🎃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.

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:

Writober 2025: Our Deepest Fears>Prompt Post

🔗Post contains Amazon associate links (shown with Aal in parentheses)
🔗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.
🖼️I made these banners from my photos and free for commercial use fonts. Feel free to use them in your posts.

🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Harbingers of Death

I remember reading once that ducks are harbingers of death. Living on a lake, I see death omens everywhere 🦆💀. What animals or symbols come up for you as death omens. I like the word harbinger. However, if I hear shrieking and wailing in the night, and see some ghostly woman floating over the dark water, I might take that omen seriously.

Though the banshees’ screams are said to predict a death in the family, letting out a good primal scream can be very freeing and make you feel alive. Give it a try. Let loose. Scream and wail with your whole being. Now that you’ve freed your voice, what will you do with it?

OctPoWriMo

The voice of a poem is the style and perspective that a specific poet brings to her work. Each of us bring our unique voice to our poems which includes all of the choices that we make: the words, the line breaks, the stanza breaks, rhythm, rhyme, and repetition. The more we write, the clearer our voice becomes.

In Tony Hoagland’s The Art of Voice_(Aal), he talks about distance as part of voice. One way to draw the reader close is to use apostrophe or specific address. He uses the example, “Listen, Daisy.” Who might you address directly in your poem?

Example Poem: “Apparition” by Mark Doty from Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection_(Aal)

Apparition

I’m carrying an orange plastic bucket of compost
down from the top of the garden—sweet dark,

fibrous rot, promising—when the light changes
as if someone’s flipped a switch that does

what? Reverses the day. Leaves chorusing,
dizzy. And then my mother says

—she’s been gone more than thirty years,
not her voice, the voice of her in me—

You’ve got to forgive me. I’m choke and sputter
in the wild daylight, speechless to that:

maybe I’m really crazy now, but I believe
in the backwards morning I am my mother’s son,

we are at last equally in love
with intoxication, I am unregenerate,

the trees are on fire, fifty-eight years of lost bells.
I drop my basket and stand struck

in the iron-mouth afternoon. She says
I never meant to harm you. Then

the young dog barks, down by the front gate,
he’s probably gotten out, and she says,

calmly, clearly, Go take care of your baby.

~Mark Doty

What images does the poet use to express his “crazy” feeling?

Prompts: Imagine a ghost appearing to you while you were doing something you enjoy doing. How would you react? What would you say? What would the spirit say to you? Use sensory imagery to express your sudden change in mood.

Possible form: Speak the poem first – use a tape recorder and just speak until you get all your ideas recorded. Listen back and write down the best lines to form your poem.

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Sixteen 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:

Writober 2025: Our Deepest Fears>Prompt Post

🔗Post contains Amazon associate links (shown with Aal in parentheses)
🔗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.
🖼️I made these banners from my photos and free for commercial use fonts. Feel free to use them in your posts.

🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Gargoyles

There was recently a report of dive-bombing owls in Seattle’s Lincoln park which reminded me of when my friend’s son was attacked by an owl. I can only imagine the horror of talons swooping down from above. The fear of gargoyles is like that, carved little winged demons looking down on us, coming to life and swooping down to exact punishment on unaware pedestrians. Or are they protectors looking over the city, only punishing evil-doers? Either way, gargoyles evoke a fear of attack from above.

As we walk around in our daily lives, we seldom look up. Most of the time we are looking down at our feet, looking for anything that might trip us. As writers, we need to look at our worlds from all sides and that includes looking up to see what’s above us, but also to get up high to get a gargoyles point of view.

You may find some inspiration from Creepy Capitol Carvings.

OctPoWriMo

It’s easy to get used to looking at things in the same way. We spend our days sitting, standing, walking, then sitting again. It’s important to look at things from a new perspective. To lay on our backs and look up. To get up high and look down. Really look. What does the gargoyle see? What gives it the right to judge? Why does it attack?

Example Poem: “In the Pinewoods, Crows and Owl” by Mary Oliver from American Primitive

In the Pinewoods, Crows and Owl

Great bumble. Sleek
slicer. How the crows
dream of you, caught at last
in their black beaks. Dream of you
leaking your life away. Your wings
crumbling like old bark. Feathers
falling from your breast like leaves,
and your eyes two bolts
of lightning gone to sleep.
Eight of them
fly over the pinewoods looking down
into the branches. They know you are
there somewhere, fat and drowsy
from your night of rabbits and rats. One
this month you caught a crow. Scraps of him
flew far and wide, the news
rang all day through the woods. The cold
river of their hatred roils
day and night: you are their dream, their waking,
their quarry, their demon. You
are the pine god who never speaks but holds
the keys to everything while they fly
morning after morning against the shut doors. You
will have a slow life, and eat them, one by one.
They know it. They hate you. Still
when one of them spies you out, all stream
straight toward violence and confrontation.
As though it helped to see the living proof.
The bone-crushing prince of dark days, gloomy
at the interruption of his rest. Hissing
and snapping, grabbing about him, dreadful
as death’s drum; mournful unalterable fact.

~ Mary Oliver

Whose point of view is the poet exploring?

Prompt: Imagine two fears that hate each other. Take the point of view of one of them and explain why they hate the other. What will happen if these two fears meet?

Possible form: A Rondeau

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Fifteen 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 writing:

Writober 2025: Our Deepest Fears>Prompt Post

🔗Post contains Amazon associate links (shown with Aal in parentheses)
🔗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.
🖼️I made these banners from my photos and free for commercial use fonts. Feel free to use them in your posts.

🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Mutation

Horror mutations happen for different reasons: toxic sludge, radiation, genetic experimentation, mad science: however mutations happen, they trigger the universal fears of ego-death (humiliation, embarrassment) and separation (being ostracized, alone).

As writers, mutation can lead to inspiration. We can take aspects of different stories and mash them together to get a completely new idea. Think of the myriad of stories that are modernizations of Greek myths or Shakespeare’s plays.

Quick Mutation Exercise: Choose two stories (books or movies) from two genres you consider opposites like Sci-fi and Historical fiction or Romance and Horror. Select stories that are as different as you can think of. Now list ten different ways that you could mash your two stories together.

Did you come up with at least one story idea that interests you and you don’t think has ever been told before?

For some mutation fun you may want to check out The Virtual Ninja Turtle Museum. Though this site is all about the TMNT action figures, I found the mutations of the different villains really fun and interesting.

OctPoWriMo

In modern poetry, every poetic movement is a mutation of poetic ideas. Each new poetic “school” with its own manifesto redefining what poetry should or could be that made them new and unique, quick to be swallowed up by the next school. Each poet creating variations, mutations to forms, allegories, themes. If poetry does one thing, it changes—mutates—constantly.

Example Poem: “The Superstitious Ghost” by Arthur Guiterman from Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre

The Superstitious Ghost

I’m such a quiet little ghost,
     Demure and inoffensive,
The other spirits say I’m most
     Absurdly apprehensive.

Through all the merry hours of night
I’m uniformly cheerful;
I love the dark; but in the light,
     I own I’m rather fearful.

Each dawn I cower down in bed,
     In every brightness seeing,
That weird uncanny for of dread—
     An awful Human Being!

Of course I’m told they can’t exist,
     That Nature would not let them:
But Willy Spook, the Humanist,
     Declares that he has met them!

He says they do not glide like us,
     But walk in eerie paces;
They’re solid, not diaphanous,
     With arms! and legs!! and faces!!!

And some are beggars, some are kings,
     Some have and some are wanting,
They squander time in doing things,
     Instead of simply haunting.

They talk of “art,” the horrid crew,
     And things they call “ambitions.”—
Oh, yes, I know as well as you
     They’re only superstitions.

But should the dreadful day arrive
     When, staring up, I see one,
I’m sure ’twill scare me quite alive;
     And then—Oh, then I’ll be one!

~Arthur Guiterman

In this poem the poet mutates the meaning of the word “humanist”. How else is this poem a mutation?

Prompt: Think of your deepest fear. Now imagine it is afraid of you. Write your poem from the frightened fear’s point of view. Why does it fear you? What expert would it site to defend its position? 

Possible form: Mutate a form. Take any form and make it your own: change the rules—the syllable count, the meter, the rhyme scheme, or any other aspect of the form. Or create your own poetic form.

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Fourteen 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:

Writober 2025: Our Deepest Fears>Prompt Post

🔗Post contains Amazon associate links (shown with Aal in parentheses)
🔗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.
🖼️I made these banners from my photos and free for commercial use fonts. Feel free to use them in your posts.

🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Giant Insects

Small insects are scary enough. They have too many legs and crawl all over things including us. Many have colonies and work en masse to overtake other creatures much larger than they are. So when we imagine these creepy crawlers as giants, it triggers our universal fear of extinction: moving us from the top of the food chain to the bottom.

Hyperbole is a rhetorical device using intentional exaggeration for emphasis or comic effect. Hyperbole is also called auxesis which literally means growth. Using hyperbole in our writing, we can take a tiny insect and make it grow and grow and grow until it is giant and frightening.

I found this crazy page that puts you in a field with some giant insects called Giant Insect World demo from Royal Entomological Society, if you’re looking for some giant insect inspiration.

OctPoWriMo

Poets use hyperbole or exaggeration for emphasis and for emotional effect. When speaking, I often exaggerate when talking, and don’t even notice I’m doing it. It’s so easy to say “everyone was doing it” or “there were millions of them” or “it was huge” when none of those statements were factual.

Example Poem: “The Bat” by Theodore Roethke from All Poetry 

The Bat

By day the bat is cousin to the mouse.
He likes the attic of an aging house.

His fingers make a hat about his head.
His pulse beat is so slow we think him dead.

He loops in crazy figures half the night
Among the trees that face the corner light.

But when he brushes up against a screen,
We are afraid of what our eyes have seen:

For something is amiss or out of place
When mice with wings can wear a human face.

~Theodore Roethke

How does this poet use hyperbole? What effect does it have?

Prompt: Think of an insect that you think would be terrifying if it was giant. In your poem describe it in detail. How would it move? What would it do? End with its most terrifying feature. Have you used hyperbole?

Possible form: Lyric poem

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Thirteen 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: