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 of the prompt words. How you participate is entirely up to you. Your work(s) can be a single piece using some or all of 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.
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.
With the inaugural challenge about to draw to a close, welcome to the second edition of Creative Writing Monthly. Think of the challenge as an opportunity to write something a little longer than the short flash fiction prompts we all love to participate in daily. Each month Greg’s Blog will prompt the writer with a concept, topic, and/or genre to help jumpstart the creative process. All you have to do is write. The length of your work should end up somewhere between 750 and 1500 words. That falls right on the boundary between a longer work of flash fiction and a short short story. Thus, giving you the opportunity to develop characters and build more elaborate plotlines. Something that is difficult to attain when responding to word prompts, sentence limits and 100-word maximum stories.
I understand longer stories take longer to write, edit, consternate over, rework, stew about, and/or rewrite… The deadline for this CWM challenge is August 31st. Each challenge will consist of the current challenge plus a glimpse of upcoming prompts for the next two challenges. In essence, three full months for those who prefer a headstart. For the rest of us who like to procrastinate, just follow my lead and keep telling yourself you work better under pressure!
The plan is to drop each monthly challenge on the last Thursday of the preceding month. So if you want to try something with more meat on the bones, check back for a new challenge monthly.
As with all Greg’s Blog challenges, I will ensure your stories are included in first Greg’s Blog Sunday Digest after the closing (This may vary if the month end and the first Sunday are crunched together. If that is the case they may appear a week later.) Thank you for participating.
August 2023 Challenge Prompt:
Concept: Greg Glazebrook / GMGCreative | Image: DALL∙E / Microsoft
Write a story about summer camp, a wilderness vacation or a day in the great outdoors.
Was it a memorable vacation or a camping disaster? Is it a story of survival, coming of age, or blissful renewal. Is it a solo vacation or do the characters bond from the experience? Let the prompt be your guide.
I look forward to reading what you conjure up. Don’t forget to show your fellow bloggers some love -❤️- take some time to read, like, and comment on their responses.
Upcoming Challenges
Month
Topic
September
Write a fictional story based on a real-life moment, event or memory from your days in grade school.
October
In the Halloween spirit, write a horror story fitting for this month of freaks and frights.
The prosecutor began his summation with vigorous enthusiasm, “In a display of utter cowardice, Mr. Kutinitov plunged the blade he carried with him right down to the marrow. Splaying the victim, his estranged wife wide open.”
“Ask yourself why?” he continued. “Sure, she had set fire to everything, exposing his philandering ways and singeing his reputation almost beyond repair. Certainly a motive in and of itself but his reason was even more basic, greed. You see, he wanted the engagement ring back, her ring, the one he’d given her along with his promise 13 years earlier. He’d spent a small fortune to buy it and he knew it had only appreciated in value. You heard his jeweller confirm that he had been to the shop to inquire about it and shortly thereafter broke into the marital home.”
He paused for effect before driving home his final point, “When he came for the ring, she refused and swallowed it to keep him from taking it. She could not have known that she had become an unwitting accessory to compromising her own survival. Her death was not a crime of passion as portrayed by the defence, it may not have been premeditated but his reasons for being there were cold, calculated and planned. As such you must find the defendant guilty. You know what’s right, return a verdict of murder in the first degree.”
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 of the prompt words. How you participate is entirely up to you. Your work(s) can be a single piece using some or all of 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.
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.
Hi everyone, I have been away and I know you have all missed Greg’s Blog (come on, at least you can pretend you did!) Summer can be a busy time and the last week with my daughter’s fast-pitch championships, a couple of intense days of fermenting, canning and preserving strawberries, raspberries, asparagus and cucumbers, and a camping trip with family have kept me busy and away from my screens. Not to mention the hours that seem to vanish when having to entertain a seven-year-old. Love him dearly but I am ready for September and the start of school again.
Unfortunately, Sunday Digest and Four Line Fiction were not published this week. I do apologize if you follow and participate in Four Line, I thought I’d had a couple more of those ready to publish but apparently, I did not. As for all your efforts for the weekly challenges that did publish, I will get to all of them and ensure they get the normal shout-out in the next Sunday Digest.
In the meantime here is some funny lottery humour I came across and thought I’d share. The first part with the husband winning was the original version I’d seen but fair is fair, so I felt it super important to make a version where the wife had won…
Welcome to another edition of T-Shirt Wisdom Wednesday for July 19th, 2023. This hump day feature is exactly what it sounds like. Every other Wednesday (bi-weekly) I will post a graphic that is funny, poignant, witty, honest, crude, toothsome, with bite, or just plain old ridiculous. Some I’ll have plagiarized directly from a chest near you. Others may not have been spotted in the wild but they probably should be out there.
Nothing good can ever come from making plans…
Suggestions are always welcome. If you come across something you think is worthy of being pasted across someone’s chest and paraded around publicly jot it down and send me a message. If it makes the cut I will whip up a graphic design template and use it in a future post. Any suggestions used will include a shout-out and link to your blog on the week it posts.
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 of the prompt words. How you participate is entirely up to you. Your work(s) can be a single piece using some or all of 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.
Note the release time adjustment from Monday morning to Sunday evening. This move is designed to provide the writer with a headstart and to facilitate future developments at Greg’s Blog. Everything else about the challenge will remain the same, including the weekly wrap-up that will continue to appear in the following week’s Sunday Digest.
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.
Welcome to Four Line Fiction, a pix-to-prose challenge. Each Tuesday, at 9:00am Eastern Time (Canada/United States) I will post an image I have captured myself, featured from another blog or plucked from one of the Interweb’s many royalty-free image sites. You as the writer are to use that image as a point of inspiration to craft a masterpiece of fiction in four lines.
Peter Dazeley / Getty Images
This week’s image contains a Burmese python, resplendent in shades of yellow, black and brown. Its head is perched atop a single chicken egg and its body is coiled around the egg and off to the right of the image. The subject is set against a black background
Be creative and have fun. I look forward to reading the tales you spin. Don’t forget to show your fellow bloggers some love -❤️- take some time to read, like, and comment on their masterpieces.
As I sit down to write Sunday Digest late on this Sunday night it occurs to me that it has been a busy week. The blog itself started the week okay but as the activities and time required with my son ramped up my work here fell off. School is out and that means my days are filled with bike rides, Lion Safari’s and stopping at every park I see.
On Friday we took Nate to African Lion Safari, an animal rescue and reserve where you get to ride through the animal enclosures in your car. The lions and tigers are usually sedate. Mostly because they have been so well fed they cannot move. The Orangutans are Nates favorite. Especially the one who decided to jump up on our car and pee down the windshield. I know little boys and the things that excite them!
He also loves the waterpark they have for the kids to play in. It is a great spot on a hot day and he spent almost three hours in the water. Running on the play structures and riding the slide. He is a little Casanova too. The kid will talk to just about anyone but gravitates to the prettiest moms and starts up full conversations with them. Even at the mall or in a restaurant before we finish he has the clerks or waitresses gathered around while he holds court!
Also this weekend I have been busy canning strawberry jam and relishes. I also set a a crick with 4 lbs. of cucumbers. Hopefully in about a week I will have fermented dill pickles. In the meantime, I made a couple of jars of refrigerator pickles to hold us over. It was Nate who noticed the happy face in the jar of pickles.
I dug deep into my Madchester sounds record collection this week to find this classic. James were a Manchester band who are best known on this side of the pond for the title track of their 1993 album “Laid”. The track initially found success on U.S. college radio before peaking at No. 3 on U.S. Alternative Radio.
The week in review…
Choices A tales of choices written by Paula at Light Motifs II.
Milestones | Just some stuff about my blog stats and some new records in 2023.
T-Shirt Wisdom | The most recent installment of this bi-weekly feature.
Next week…
Five Word Weekly has already dropped about 3 hours ago and Four Line Fiction is on tap for Tuesday. Don’t forget to get your entry in for July’s Creative Writing Monthly, July 31st is almost here. Have a great week everyone,
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 of the prompt words. How you participate is entirely up to you. Your work(s) can be a single piece using some or all of 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.
Note the release time adjustment from Monday morning to Sunday evening. This move is designed to provide the writer with a headstart and to facilitate future developments at Greg’s Blog. Everything else about the challenge will remain the same, including the weekly wrap-up that will continue to appear in the following week’s Sunday Digest.
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.
Greg's Blog 