Welcome to Five Word Weekly. Five random words will drop on Sunday evenings at 5:00pm (17:00h) Eastern Standard Time (Canada/United States). Your task is to craft prose or poetry using any or all the prompt words. How you participate is entirely up to you. Your work(s) can be a single piece using some or all the words, a series of stand-alone projects incorporating at least one of the words in each, or an epic serial linking the words over several entries. Let the words be the inspiration that takes you wherever your imagination leads.
Here are your prompt words for the coming week:
gold | cloudy | slumber | unicorn | rainbow
Be creative and have fun. I look forward to reading what each of you conjures up. Don’t forget to show your fellow bloggers some love -❤️- take some time to read, like, and comment on their responses.
Rules and Guidelines
- Use as many of the weekly words as you see fit as long as each work contains at least one prompt. You can view the definition of each word at Merriam-Webster by clicking on the word in the text bar located below the word image.
- If writing multiple pieces, it is recommended (but not essential) that posts be published throughout the week keeping the daily volume of material manageable for your readers. Spreading out the posts will provide continuous content for your blog that will attract multiple visits and develop regular readers. Writing the prompts as a serial should supercharge that effect.
- There are no constraints to style (prose, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, etc…) or length but please try to keep it to something in the flash fiction realm. Nobody is getting paid here so save the novels for your publisher. Brevity is the key to success.
- You can use any variation of the words including different forms of speech (noun, verb, adjective, etc…), varying definitions (i.e. hibernating bear or bear weight but not homophones like bare necessities), plural forms, tense, etc…
- When posting to your blog please add a pingback (link) to the Five Word Weekly challenge post and include the tags #gb5ww and #gmgblog on your post.
- If you prefer, you can submit your work directly to the Five Word Weekly comments section however links to your submission will not appear in the FWW roundup on Greg’s Blog Sunday Digest.
- Tell the world. It would be greatly appreciated if you shared the Five Word Weekly challenge post to your social media accounts.
- Post submitted to the Five Words Weekly challenge may be included in a weekly roundup post at Greg’s Blog and may appear on the Five Words Podcast currently in development. It is understood that all written works remain the property of the author.
Please reach out if you have questions or feedback about this challenge or anything of the content presented on Greg’s Blog.
Five Word Podcast
Season 1 Coming Soon.
In the meantime check out Greg’s Blog – The Podcast on Spotify.
This post was produced by GMGCreative.
Copyright 2023 Greg Glazebrook @ GMGCreative. All Rights Reserved.
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Greg's Blog 
Imperator Furiosa grit her teeth as she clutches at the leather-wrapped steering wheel of the 28-wheel rig. She brays, bellows and bucks maniacally in rhythm with the entire convoy as it belches a wretched death metal cavalcade of calamity, topped with forty-foot flames, across the desert at 80mph.
The entire dashboard of the rig is littered with toys, figurines and tchotchkes of every description jigging, jarring and hanging on for dear life. Some of the toys are cheering with excitement, while others have already fallen unconscious. All are shaken as the massive rig blasts through mini dune after mini dune; sending sand flying in every direction.
Furiosa has elbowed the sunshade and jammed it between the window and the top of the door. A lone toy ornament hangs precariously off the end of the shade as it jostles with every impact, with every dune. She is a small golden unicorn with rainbow mane and tail – or it was, some time ago. Even so, she is by far, the most brilliant member of Furiosa’s collection, at least in her own mind. Perhaps, with just a few more dunes, just one or two more… good… bumps…
…bumps…bumps…bumps..bump.bum.bumbumbumps…
Sometimes it really is just the smallest things that end up changing us the most.
Two small children play in the sand. The babbles and sounds of their play echo softly on the sands. All is quiet. Their grey and brown tatters are more patch than fabric, their crooked teeth whistle and their hair is fraying nests, but they play as happily as anyone.
The boy holds a battered, almost hairless doll’s head barely sewn onto the repurposed remains of old socks with only two, loose, sloppy stitches, making her head flop awkwardly. Next to the doll, lays most of a brick, and a variety of sticks and stones.
“I am important person Furosa!” he exclaims, as the dolls head flops awkwardly back. “Give me all your water and gas or I will rip ALL your toenails!” he flops her head towards the brick, which appears to have two small stones, armed with twigs, standing guard in front of it. He glances up at his sister to see if she is still following the story.
“Forsa gon’ take ALL they toenails Bo?” she asked, her face puckered with anxious concern as she preciously grabs at her own toes. He could see her jaw begin to tense just a bit too much.
“Too far, ugh” he thinks to himself, “turn it back a notch…”
“We’s stones! We got no toes! Ahaaaa!” as he grabs the stones and motions to make them hop up and down on top of Furosa. “Ya Furosa, you’ mean, but stones are tough too! Furosa you go home now or we crush your toes, ‘n make ‘m purple! Haha!”
“Aw look sis, Furosa run away! See? Stones are safe and happy with water AND gas too. Happy stones have a dance and fall asleep safe and sound.”
As the sun sets heavy on the sands, a gentle breeze stirs along the base of the ridge, the caps of tiny dunes, a horned toad chewing an earwig, along with a hundred feathers and slips of old lace trailing windchimes.
A mother sits just a few feet from the chimes, half humming, musing and stirring, staring vacantly while she rocks and stirs, not noticing the fly or the stray wrist thrown after it.
“Chile! You bring your sisser here now’n’eat and you drag no heel, hear!”
They’ve been playing at the base of the ridge where the sun warms the rocks.
A profound vibration suddenly begins to rise as if from within the earth itself. The children instantly dive for cover, as a murderous convoy approaches at 80mph. Fascination and fear fight for space on the children’s faces, but the convoy passess almost as quickly as it appeared, leaving a swarm of cloudy sand swirling.
“Didn’t I say come here now chile? Wretch you come eat now affore Furiosa come’n catch you both!”
At that, they shrieked and ran home fast, and the last of the light that shone at the base of the ridge, where the children were playing, began to fade. And the cloudy sand began to settle, and as it settled Doll Furosa, the brick and the stones, could now clearly see a small golden lump stumble and try to stand, as if awoken from a long slumber. The unicorn took time to right itself from such a rude fall from Furiosa’s sun visor, to get swept up in a vortex of flames and diesel exhaust, and then land in a lump under a generous skiff of sand. It took several tries to shake shimmy and heave her gold coat free and get all the dust out of her rainbow coat, mane and tail, and then several minutes of determined licking to properly arrange her whiskers and eyelashes ‘just so’.
Raggedy as she may have been to you or I, to say the sticks, stones and Doll Furosa were impressed would be a dire injustice. They stood in disbelief.
“Let me see what we have heeeeere” chimed the unicorn, as she approached the toys, “Don’t tell me YOU are what passes for a toy around here?” She asked as she pretentiously flicked her mane and horn towards Doll Furosa.
A tumbleweed bounced meanderingly between them, then a flash of wrath caught in the corner of Furosa’s eye, as it flopped forward onto the sand…
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