If you’re looking for a quick writing challenge, why not give these a go?:
OPTION ONE: Write a fifteen-word story with the words WICKED, WRITER and WAR in it somewhere.
OPTION TWO: Write a poem or limerick on the theme of FUN.
OPTION THREE: Your word of the week is the PAST. What does that mean to you? Happy memories? Sad times? Family relationships? A deep, dark secret? Your piece can be fact or fiction.
Thank you to everyone who gave last week’s challenge a go. Here are the wonderful results:
OPTION ONE was to write a fifteen-word story with the words GOLD, EVIL and LOVE in it somewhere.
Michael crafted this great story:
Mr Gold was pure evil but still sought love. He found it in Mary’s heart.
Sacha Black found time in her busy schedule for a clever story:
Gold’s ‘dark one’ evil was never a match for Belle’s love, she won every time.
OPTION TWO was to write a poem or limerick on the theme of SPACE.
I don’t know how Keith Channing does it, but he always delivers some amazing limericks:
In the sixties there was a great race
To throw humans far into space.
It wasn’t too soon
To put men on the moon,
And no-one had egg on their face.
In the race to the moon, the US
Sent up thirty odd craft with success.
From the CCCP
Less than twenty we see,
But forgive me, I shouldn’t digress.
For seventeen years the Space Station
Has been the source of much elation.
I hardly need speak
Of our own Major Peake;
A credit to all of our nation.
Now, when we go into the void,
There are many who get quite annoyed.
They think it not funny
To spend so much money
They believe could be better employed.
For myself, I am always impressed
By the levels to which we’ve progressed.
One thing about space,
It’s a bloody big place;
It demands, and it brings out our best.
Please visit Ladyleemanila‘s site to see her entertaining limerick:
https://ladyleemanila.wordpress.com/2016/09/02/my-weekly-writing-challenge-2/
Now for Bindu’s interesting take on space:
Space, now isn’t that what we all pine for?
Space for a spread-out comfortable living,
Space where we share and there’s scope of giving,
Space in someone specials shrinking heart,
Space to chit-chat, to pour out one’s thought.
Space that has been so vast, immeasurable and infinite,
Appears to have become distant,far out of reach.
David Harrison is very witty:
Option three asked you to write about the word PHOBIA.
Enjoy Keith Channing‘s super piece:
When I was younger, I wasn’t afraid of anything.
That’s not entirely true. Mum was in charge of family discipline; Dad was out to work all day, and it was Mum who had to deal with us after school and all day during the holidays. We knew what to expect from Mum. There was a range of punishments, depending on the severity of the crime and the extent to which it upset the well-ordered life that Mum tried to make for herself and for all of us.
Sometimes, if any of us didn’t show suitable remorse after the sanctions she’d meted out, or if we continued with the unwanted behaviour, she uttered the words that we all feared; the only thing that would bring us to our knees, literally. Yes, those words. “You wait till your father gets home”. We’d beg her not to tell Dad, and undertake never ever to repeat the offending whatever it was we did. And we meant it, we really did. At least until bed-time, when all undertakings slipped off, with us, to the land of Nod.
In fairness, I have to say that she never did tell Dad what we’d been doing; not in our hearing, anyhow. I always thought, though, that the hearty laughter we often heard from the two of them, long after we were (supposed to be) asleep, may well have had some loose link to our daytime escapades.
But that, and the school bully, was the only thing I ever feared.
The headmaster st school was a bit of a tyrant, too.
We never played in the old ruins by the river. Mum told us that a bogeyman lived there, and that he hated children. It seems that he took delight in causing pain to young people. She said he was worse than the monsters that I knew lived under my bed but she said were fig-mints of my imagination. I spent hours checking out all the sweet shops, but never found anything like fig-mints, so had no idea what she meant by that. The monsters were real, as everybody knows. When she asked me, I said they’d never attacked me because I never looked directly at them. That’s what you have to do; not make eye contact with them. It works. Trust me. Our dog always attacks the postman, to stop him attacking us. That works, too. We’ve never been attacked by the postie.
She told us not to take lifts from strangers in cars, because they don’t all like children, and we shouldn’t take sweeties from strangers and particularly never ever pick up sweeties from the ground and eat them, even if they’re still in their wrappers. Why? Because there are people who inject them with poison, to make children ill.
And we had never to let a policeman catch us doing anything naughty, because they’d box our ears and throw us in jail. And keep away from strange dogs, in case they bite. And don’t play in the long grass in case there are any snakes there. If they bite you, you could die!
No, I wasn’t afraid of anything. Except Dad, the school bully, the headmaster, the bogeyman, the monsters under my bed, strangers in cars or with sweets, policeman, dogs and snakes. I won’t say anything about the vicar, because I think Mum was afraid of him, too. She always hid behind the curtains when he came into our street. Yeah, and the rent collector, too.
I miss those carefree days; we were invincible!
Now it’s over to the wonderful Geoff Le Pard:
Ethel Phobia couldn’t understand why no one appeared to like her. She had nice hair, a pair of lips that would do service in a tomato salad and most of her own teeth. Her breath left barely any aftertaste and she had mastered control of her bowel, for the most part. Her figure, while tending to go out where fashion suggested it should go in, was fulsome rather than plump and, if she dressed conservatively then it was a phase and she was sure her liberal credentials would return soon. So why did people, men and women just ignore her? Just looked right through her as if she wasn’t there? She asked her mirror, a source of wisdom with just the right amount of total bitchery. Mirror thought for a moment. ‘It’s because you dead fatso. And drop the blue eye shadow.’
David Harrison has written something a little different. Enjoy:
LET’S DO IT!
An ambitious arachnid’s letter to his followers.
Dear colleagues one and all-male, female, large and small.
I would like, craving your indulgence, to take this opportunity to address you on the subject of PHOBIA. I write of course of that peculiar strain of phobia which appears to grip almost the entire human population of this planet we share, at the very mention of our species and the ensuing panic which then proceeds to engulf both sexes of its membership when we scuttle from our refuges within their homes and make an appearance on their living room walls, floors and ceilings. When we consider this, alongside our ability to render their bathrooms out of bounds by simply squatting in the tub itself, I am sure you will agree with me in regard to the considerable possibilities which present themselves to us.
Until the present, before this new realisation of our power had become clear to us, we believed that we were in in grave danger, given that the human species is several times larger than ours. Today my friends I say just this to you. No more! The tables have turned, the winds of change have blown. WE are the masters now!
So let us face the future with a new and well-founded confidence, in the unshakeable knowledge that it is our species which is the true ruler of our world. By our appearance we engender sheer terror. In our movement we create mass hysteria. Indeed simply by our existence we reduce humanity to a gibbering wreck of complete and utter impotence in the face of our advance.
And so I return to the considerable possibilities on which I touched previously, an example of which has just occurred. Upon crawling out from behind a curtain I have, not a minute since, sent a human female rushing from the room shrieking uncontrollably.
This and other such incidents make it clear to me that our domination of the planet Earth is not far in the distance. Others have tried by many means and failed. We, on the other hand, have only to present ourselves to succeed.
Comrades I exhort you. Let us march forward to our goal. Let us not shrink from our task. Let’s do it!
Yours most sincerely
Arachnid 33 (Black Widow Division.)
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Esther Chilton 
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