I try and do poetry once a month and lately I've been highlighting using Figurative Language. This week we looked at antithesis. My hope with this is to make writing club members aware of tools that they can use later in other writing projects. Antithesis: uses parallel structure to juxtapose contrasting ideas. (Grammarly.com) This prompt inspired some beautiful pieces.

The prompt that produced this story was "Found Footage." The inspiration was The Blair Witch Project. This is probably the best well know found footage movie. This was a great way to end the Halloween season. My short story does not deal with video but film. This is the unpolished, original story. I will probably go in and clean up this story a bit.

In my quest to learn to write concisely in creative endeavors the prompt this week, in the spirit of Halloween was two sentence horror. Write a horror story in just two sentences. This was very difficult but people also really liked this prompt. I do love a challenge. Do you enjoy reading horror? Have you ever tried to write this way?

A couple of times a year I get the chance to hangout on the sidelines with Keltin for a Tarleton football game. This last weekend the Texans played the ACU Wildcats and... lost their first game of the season 31 to 28. The score makes it look like they played well, having watched the game, I'm not sure that was the case until the 4th quarter.

If you have read enough original Grimm or Anderson fairy tales you know that Disney had to tone them way down to be G rated. The prompt this week was to retell a fairy tale and in the spirit of spooky season - go dark with it. I don't think my retelling is really horror but it was a fun writing prompt.

Denton Writing Club's first zine! Depending on how this one does we will look at publishing more on a schedule but for now, we are just super happy to have this one live! There are also print versions. I have to give full credit to the members of the writing club that are willing to share their work like this with the public.

I'm behind on posting. I feel like this is a consistent problem. Anyway, I am consistent with writing club and one of the things that I've started doing is highlighting figurative language. This week's was alliteration. Definition: Alliteration refers to repeating consonant sounds right next to each other, which creates a memorable or melodic effect. (Grammarly.com) I chose mine to be fall themed.

I know I haven't posted as much as I intended this summer. I have been busy, in good ways: Working on my novel rewrite (40k words and counting) Running the Denton Writing Club Prepping for a trip where we are taking mules and a horse Honestly, this last part has taken the most time because for trip like this you have to get the animals in shape as much as you do yourself, along with getting all their health stuff sorted, and making sure all your gear is in good condition. Anyway, hope you all are doing well. Enjoy these videos of horses and mules. Safe travels.

It is officially fall and for the writing group that means it is the start of spooky season. We are starting off with a prompt about meeting a cryptid or creature from folklore. This could be in any context. Yes, I did mix my folklore creatures from different regions. This was a fun pieces. Some of the pieces produced were creepy, some were funny but all were well done.

If you have been following along for a while you know that at club have been working on writing concisely. This prompt is called a Hint, a story written in just 25 words. I have been working on shortening one particular story over time. Telling a story in 25 words is difficult. A lot of us found that our 25 word stories were actually great attention grabbers for a longer piece.

This past week's prompt was Epic Poetry. I will preface this by saying: no, we did not have time to write a full Epic. It was more looking at the elements: magic, a hero, a vast setting, etc. I did not start a new piece for this prompt; instead I worked on a poem I had started a couple of years ago.

One of the things that we've really been working on at writing club is writing concisely. This week's prompt was a mini-saga, a 50 word short story. My plan was to write flash fiction and then shorten that over time. I have done this but plenty of people have written something new for each of these prompts. These short pieces are meant to challenge the writer.

The prompt this last week was dreams - open to any interpretation of that. Even though I decide on the prompts, I had no idea what I was going to write about when I sat down to write this one. It's not my best but at least I got something on the page. What do you write about when you have writers block?

The North Texas Fair and Rodeo is currently going on and of course I had to go. I love taking photos as many of you have learned if you follow my site. I need to go get some more 35mm film but in the meantime I decided to take Polaroid photos. This is a Polaroid 660 that I was given by my grandmother.

The idea with this prompt was to start with free verse poetry and add an element of form poetry to making writing a bit more of a challenge. Examples: Refrains (Think Villanelle) Meter (various) Rhyme scheme (various) Specific line count Theme (Looking at you Ode) The form poetry element was left up to the writer, I just provided suggestions. I chose to play with a Sonnet (14 lines - turn at line 13-14) but instead of doing Iambic Pentameter I did six beats per line.

The purpose of this prompt was to make the setting the main focus. I wanted people to write something that if they moved the story out of this particular setting, the story wouldn't work. I could not have written this story at sea level or on the Great Plains. As a writer I tend to focus more on character development and a lot of my stories can happen anywhere and to make my writing stronger, I need to change that.

A Drabble is a story of 100 words. I selected this as a prompt to work on concise writing. If you remember the Flash Fiction from a few weeks back my plan was to use that as a starting point for this piece. Some group members used it, some didn't and that's okay. We all start as a spark, a small bright innocent point in the vastness.

The prompt for this poem was pick a poem, any poem ,and take a single element that you like from that poem and write your own poem using that element. I selected My Last Duchess by Robert Browning. This poem is deceptively dark and messed up. That is not the element I chose to replicate, this poem is also a conversation but the reader only sees what the speaker of the poem has to say, not the person they are "speaking" to.

So my prompt for this one was: You’re Earth’s 1st interplanetary ambassador on the way to meet the other planet representatives…  and go. This pieces was 100% influenced by Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Treasure Planet. Is it perfect no, was it fun to write, yes. The starwhales are laughing at me as I am stuck in my flying ocean.

So this series has been very delayed. It was never meant to be delayed this long I just didn't get around to it because I got busy and distracted with life. So I'm playing catch-up. Blame the video editing - it takes forever and I'm still working on my book. Yes, I'm actually working on it, not just saying that. Also, life just gets in the way.

The prompt for this week was basic flash fiction - no more than 1000 words. One of the things that I want to work on is writing concisely. This and some other prompts I have planned help with that. Do you like writing flash fiction? Let me know in the comments. I began my life as a spark, lept from a mother flame, contained within a ring of slowly blackening stones.

Trump is more emboldened than ever to destroy library funding. We need you to take action today!

This was our final day in Amsterdam. When we planned this trip we left this day open because we knew that we would find things that we wanted to do that we didn't know about previously and we did. Keltin called this day "Boatday" because of the museums we visited. Houseboat Museum We found out about the Houseboat Museum during the canal tour.

The prompt this week was form poetry, specifically the Terza Rima. Here are the guidelines for writing one: Poem comprised of tercets (or three-line stanzas) Lines are eight to 10 syllables long (usually iambic meter) Lines one and three rhyme in each tercet Line two rhymes with lines one and three of the next tercet (creating a rhyme pattern like this: aba/bcb/cdc/ded and so on) …

This was defiantly the art museum day. If you want to visit the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, buy your tickets in advance. Honestly, that's my advice for pretty much any popular tourist attraction. Van Gogh Museum Keltin and I both loved the Van Gogh Museum. The way the museum is laid out takes you through his early years (where color was scarce), his contemporary inspiration, his self portraits as he learned color theory in Paris, his later works both in an out of hospitals for his mental health.